Michael Sellam is a French sound artist and musician associated with the French experimental music scene. His work engages with electroacoustic composition and improvised sound in contexts that include gallery installation, performance, and recording. He has participated in the broader French experimental music network alongside artists associated with the GRM tradition and the Parisian experimental underground.

The Bach Revolution was a Japanese synthesizer ensemble active in the mid-to-late 1970s, comprising Kazutaka Tazaki, Motoaki Suzukawa, and Akiro Kamio, mentored and produced by Isao Tomita. Their 1976 debut presented polyphonic synthesizer works described as Electric Poems; they followed with Synthesizer Study (1978, Yamaha) — a teaching tool for analog synthesis recorded with Takashi Kokubo and members of Mandrake (including Susumu Hirasawa) — and the progressive electronic album No Warning (1979, RCA).

Based in Cologne, Germany, this electronic musician specialises in micro-noise performance using customised and circuit-bent instruments built according to a do-it-yourself ethos. His work centres on improvisation within projects including Trio Die Schrauber and The KØP, as well as composition-based multimedia work through REALTIME-RESEARCH and the QUANTUM QUASI dance projects. He has performed at festivals across Europe, the United States, and Mexico alongside artists including John Butcher, Thomas Lehn, and Alan Silva, and leads workshops on circuit-bending, DIY instrument-building, and synth design in MAX/MSP.

Paul DeMarinis is an American artist and educator whose long career in media art has produced installations, performances, and interactive works that investigate the history and politics of communication technologies. Based in San Francisco and teaching at Stanford University, he has explored the telephone, the phonograph, the telegraph, and other communication media as subjects for artistic investigation and cultural critique.

His installations frequently use obsolete or misappropriated technology to create unexpected communicative situations — works that expose the assumptions embedded in familiar technologies by using them in unfamiliar ways.

RYBN.ORG is a Paris-based extra-disciplinary collective founded in 1999. Their practice consists of an investigative methodology applied to the hidden logics of complex systems: high-frequency financial markets, algorithmic trading strategies, offshore banking networks, kabbalistic hermeneutics, digital labour, and computer viruses. Rather than representing these systems from the outside, RYBN.ORG produces devices — artworks, instruments, interventions — that infiltrate, contaminate, and operate within the environments they examine, generating resonances in social networks, financial markets, patent law, and the radio-electromagnetic spectrum.

Monolake is the project of Robert Henke (born 1969), a German electronic musician, software developer, and visual artist based in Berlin. Co-founder of Ableton with Gerhard Behles, Henke developed Monolake in parallel as a vehicle for minimal techno and experimental electronic music. His albums on Chain Reaction, Imbalance Computer Music, and his own label Monolake deploy precise digital sound design and carefully structured rhythmic systems that occupy a space between club-functional techno and conceptual sound art. Subsequent work has moved increasingly into ambisonics, spatial audio performance, and laser-based visual installation, performed under the title Lumière.

Formed in 1996 by SEMBO Kensuke and AKAIWA Yae, Exonemo is a Japanese art unit that works across digital and analogue environments to expose the relationships between technology and its users. Their practice encompasses video, installation, performance, and internet-based work, and is characterised by humour, subversion, and an investigation of how digital media shapes everyday life. In 2006 their work The Road Movie won a Golden Nica at Ars Electronica. Since 2012 they have organised the Internet Yami-Ichi, a flea market making the immaterial matter of cyberspace tangible through online-themed objects, held in Tokyo, New York, and beyond. They have been based in New York since 2015.

Kabukabu is an experimental music project working with electronics and noise in underground experimental contexts. Its practice explores the textures and behaviors of electronic sound through improvised and composed approaches. Active in experimental music communities, Kabukabu contributes to ongoing investigations of the possibilities of experimental music and sound. Releases circulate through specialist underground channels, participating in the culture of independent experimental music that values personal artistic vision, direct sonic exploration, and independence from commercial or genre-conformist pressures.

Martin Speicher is a German saxophonist, clarinetist, and composer born in 1958 in Püttlingen, based in Kassel. He plays baritone, soprano, and sopranino saxophone, as well as clarinet and bass clarinet, and works in new music and free improvisation. Trained in musicology and philosophy from 1979, he has taught saxophone at various music schools in Kassel and approaches his work from an analytical as well as performative standpoint. Despite this background he does not identify as a jazz musician, situating his practice within experimental music. With saxophonist Matthias Schubert, he co-founded Polytonale, a Kassel series bringing regional improvisers together to present their own work.

José Wolffer is a Mexico City-born cultural manager, curator, and music critic. He studied piano at the National School of Music at UNAM and orchestral conducting at the Vienna Conservatory. In 2002 he founded Festival Radar, a yearly cycle of concerts, conferences, and educational activities centred on experimental and new music, which ran until 2011. He served as general director of FMX–Festival de México from 2007 to 2010, headed Casa del Lago from 2017 to 2019, and was general director of Música UNAM from 2020 to 2024. He has developed curatorial work for Radio UNAM, the National Phonotheque, and 17 Instituto de Estudios Críticos, and has written for Letras Libres and Reforma.

Rudolf Eb.er is a Swiss artist and de/composer born in 1967 in Zürich and based in Osaka, working under various monikers including Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck, which he operated from 1989 to 2009. A founding figure of Schimpfluch Gruppe — formed in Zürich in 1987 alongside Joke Lanz and Dave Phillips — his practice combines psychoacoustic noise, body-based performance, and close-field recordings of nature and decay. His releases appear on labels including PAN, iDEAL, Entr'acte, Harbinger Sound, and Tochnit Aleph. He describes his work as ritualistic actionism aimed at traversing the traumatic depths of human experience.

D.A.F. (Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft) was a German electronic duo formed in Düsseldorf in 1978, comprising vocalist Gabi Delgado-López and drummer/synthesiser player Robert Görl. Their stripped-down combination of aggressive percussion, minimal synth bass, and confrontational vocals — drawing on both industrial and early electronic dance music — produced albums including Alles Ist Gut (1981) and Gold und Liebe (1981) on Virgin. Their influence on EBM, techno, and body music was decisive. The duo reunited periodically across subsequent decades; Delgado-López died in 2020.

Payal Kapadia (b. 1986) is an Indian filmmaker based in Mumbai whose work engages with memory, labour, political violence, and everyday experience. A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), her debut feature documentary, won the Golden Eye at Cannes, constructing an essay film from student protest footage and love letters that placed contemporary political activism within a meditation on historical memory and loss. Her fiction feature All We Imagine as Light (2024) received the Grand Prix at Cannes — the first Indian film to receive a major Cannes award in three decades — a quietly devastating account of two nurses navigating love, solitude, and labour in a city of contradictions.

JJJJJerome Ellis (born 1989) is an American musician, writer, and interdisciplinary artist based in New York. A flautist, singer, and sound artist with a stutter, Ellis has developed a practice that makes his stutter central to performance and composition, treating disfluency as an aesthetic and political condition rather than an obstacle. His records Elia (2020) and The Clearing (2021) combine field recordings, prayer, spoken text, and improvised music into long-form pieces that are simultaneously intimate and architecturally monumental. He is widely recognised as one of the most original artists to emerge in American experimental music in recent years.

Dagmar Krause (born 1950) is a German singer who was a member of Slapp Happy alongside Peter Blegvad and Anthony Moore, and later a pivotal figure in Henry Cow's vocal practice. Her voice — capable of moving between cabaret theatricality, folk directness, and fierce political commitment — was central to the union of Slapp Happy and Henry Cow in the mid-1970s, as heard on In Praise of Learning (1975). She has subsequently recorded albums of Hanns Eisler and Kurt Weill settings and collaborated with a wide range of musicians in the European avant-garde. Her command of the German cabaret and Brechtian tradition gives her work a distinctive historical depth.

Fabio Carboni is an Italian producer based in Milan, co-founder of the Die Schachtel label, and owner of Soundohm distribution, an international online mailorder that maintains a large inventory of several thousand titles, specializing in Electronic/Avantgarde music and Sound Art, highly collectible original items, and in addition rare, out-of-print and sometime impossible-to-find artists’ records, multiples and limited gallery editions. Established early 2003 by Bruno Stucchi and Fabio Carboni, Die Schachtel is a label focused on early Italian electronic composers before expanding its interest in contemporary and open-form music, sound poetry, and artists’ projects on record.

Born in 1980 in Southern California, this Deaf American artist uses drawing, video, performance, and installation to examine the social rules that govern sound and the politics of hearing culture. Her first language is American Sign Language. She received MFAs from the School of Visual Arts and Bard College and now lives in Berlin. Her Degrees of Deaf Rage series of charcoal drawings depicted the catalogue of indignities imposed on Deaf people by the hearing world. In 2020 she performed at Super Bowl LIV, signing the national anthem in a landmark collaboration with the NFL and the National Association of the Deaf.

Born in the Netherlands in 1977, Martijn van Boven studied at the Royal Art Academy in The Hague and has worked at the intersection of experimental film, computer-generated image, and sound since the early 2000s. He co-founded the TAG Media Center in The Hague in 2003 and joined the curatorial team of Sonic Acts, the Amsterdam festival working at the intersection of art, music, and science, in 2005. He headed the Design Art Technology department at ArtEZ Institute from 2012 to 2021. His films and video installations have been presented at festivals including IFF Rotterdam, Transmediale, and Ars Electronica.

A Norwegian artist who trained at the Academy of Arts in Bergen and completed an MA in the Nordic Sound Art programme in 2012, she works across sound installation, video, performance, field recording, and instrument-building to approach place as a layered dynamic produced by geological, biological, atmospheric, and social forces. Her graduation work Urphänomene suspended a concrete block from the Bergen Kunsthall ceiling with transducers inside amplifying a recorded storm. Her subsequent research has focused especially on man-made holes — tunnels, repositories, and sealed vaults — as sites where civilisation stores its past for an undefined future.

NÄO is a French industrial and noise project from Besançon, formed around Pierre André (machines, electronics), Tibo (drums), and Jordan (guitar). Working at the intersection of power electronics, industrial rhythm, and noise, the group released four albums: Picture This If You Will (2009), Näo (2011) and Duel (2016) on Ant-Zen, and III (2014) on Audiotrauma. They performed at Maschinenfest in 2011 and 2014, and at Wave-Gotik-Treffen in 2012 and 2016, establishing themselves as a fixture of the European industrial underground.

Ánde Somby (born 1958, Buolbmat, Norway) is a Sámi joiker, performer, and legal scholar. Active since 1974, he joiks persons, animals, and landscapes, drawing from both the reindeer-herder tundra tradition and the melodic eastern North Sámi village style. His album Yoiking with the Winged Ones (Ash International, 2016), recorded outdoors in Lofoten by Chris Watson, is a key document of his practice. He co-founded the Sámi publishing and record label Dat, has performed at the funeral of Malcolm McLaren, and is Associate Professor of Indigenous Rights Law at the University of Tromsø.

Romanian-born Greek-French composer and architect (1922–2001), Xenakis transformed twentieth-century music by applying stochastic processes, game theory, and set theory to composition. Trained as a civil engineer in Athens, he fled to France in 1947 after fighting in the resistance against Nazi occupation. He worked with Le Corbusier and studied under Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire. His orchestral work Metastaseis (1954) assigned independent parts to every musician, while Terretektorh (1966) dispersed players among the audience. His percussion works Psappha (1975) and Pléïades (1979) remain landmarks of the instrument.

People Like Us is the project of British artist Vicki Bennett, based in Brighton and San Francisco. Working since the early 1990s with found footage, archival recordings, and radical collage techniques, she creates audio-visual works that repurpose the material of popular culture with sharp wit and structural precision. Her video and audio works have been screened and performed internationally; she co-runs the online radio station WFMU. She is an exponent of plunderphonics and a longtime collaborator with Ergo Phizmiz. Her work is held in major collections and has been released on labels including Illegal Art.

OOIOO is a Japanese experimental group led by Yoshimi P-We (Yoshimi Yokota), also drummer of the Boredoms, formed in Osaka in 1995. Where the Boredoms pursued collective ecstasy through noise and drumming, OOIOO developed a more rhythmically intricate and vocally foregrounded sound — complex polyrhythms, free-form singing, and dense percussion layered into sprawling, difficult-to-categorise compositions. Releases including Feather Float (1999), Taiga (2006), and Gamel (2011) document an evolving practice that draws on free jazz, traditional Japanese music, gamelan, and noise without replicating any of them. The group has remained consistently active under Yoshimi's direction.

Born in Reims in 1929, he was the first in his family to attend university, studying German literature before turning to sociology. His 1981 essay Simulacra and Simulation argued that contemporary society had replaced reality with signs and symbols, producing a condition of hyperreality in which copies precede and override originals. The book became foundational to postmodern cultural theory and later gained wide notoriety after being referenced in The Matrix. Among his other influential works are The Consumer Society (1970) and America (1986). He died in Paris in March 2007.

Ø is the solo alias of Finnish musician Mika Vainio (1963–2017), best known as one half of Pan_sonic alongside Ilpo Väisänen. Active under the Ø name on Helsinki's Sähkö Recordings since the early 1990s, Vainio debuted with Metri (1994), a double LP of dense, rhythmic minimal techno recorded live to DAT using analog gear. Subsequent releases including Oleva (1996) marked a decisive shift toward non-rhythmic abstraction — immersive, evolving drones that diverged sharply from Pan_sonic's harsher industrial pulse.

Spanish electronic composer from Almería, Andalusia, who began his practice in 1976 under the influence of the Berlin School — Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze — and American minimalism. He has independently released sixteen albums on his own label, Extrarradio, with very limited distribution, building a devoted following among enthusiasts of Spanish electronic music. Works such as Tau and Sonido Para Acciones are considered significant in the history of Iberian electronic composition. His 2020 double album SLG3, issued in an edition of three hundred copies, marked his first vinyl release in over a decade.

The Batcave was a London nightclub that opened in July 1982 at the Gargoyle Club on Soho's Meard Street, quickly becoming the defining venue of the British goth and post-punk scene. Founded by Specimen's Ollie Wisdom and Jon Klein, it drew regulars from Bauhaus, The Cure, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, with DJs spinning electro, industrial, and darkwave. Its visual aesthetic — black clothing, theatrical makeup, elaborate hairstyles, and an embrace of mortality and decadence — became the template for goth as a subculture. It closed by the mid-1980s as underground appeal gave way to tourist curiosity, but its brief existence left a lasting imprint on goth fashion and identity.

Sutekh is the alias of Seth Horvitz, a San Francisco-based electronic musician and visual artist. Working in abstract techno and experimental electronic music, he has released on Context, Graham Massey's Utter and other labels since the late 1990s. His albums Nitrate (2002) and Fell (2003) develop a precise, clinical style of minimal electronic music characterised by digital precision and an unusual approach to rhythm that positions him alongside Monolake and Wolfgang Voigt in the abstract techno tradition. He has also worked as a visual artist, producing moving-image work that accompanies and complements his music.

Nina Hagen (b. 1955, Berlin) is a German singer, songwriter, and actress known for her extraordinary vocal range, theatrical performances, and central role in both German punk and Neue Deutsche Welle. Born and raised in East Berlin, she began her career as an actress and pop singer before her stepfather Wolf Biermann's citizenship was withdrawn in 1976, after which she emigrated to Hamburg.

She soon formed the Nina Hagen Band with producer Manfred Praeker and others, releasing the influential debut Nina Hagen Band (1978) on CBS Records.

Avanti Singh is a multidisciplinary artist whose work intersects sound, performance, text, and visual practice. Her work explores feminist and postcolonial questions through experimental forms, drawing on diasporic experience and sonic memory. She is part of a generation of artists working across disciplines who refuse fixed genre categories, finding productive space between poetry, sound composition, and performance. Her work has been presented at festivals and institutions across Europe and beyond, contributing to ongoing conversations about decolonization and experimental aesthetics.

Peter Sotos is an American writer and noise musician whose work occupies extreme, contested territory within industrial and noise culture. His early fanzine Pure, published in Chicago in the early 1980s and focused on violent and sexual extremity, resulted in his arrest on obscenity charges in 1984. As a noise musician — contributing to Whitehouse and related projects — and as a writer, his work addresses transgressive content with a directness that refuses conventional moral framing. His books, including Total Abuse (1989) and Selfish, Little (1996), draw on the influence of Andrea Dworkin and the Marquis de Sade, refusing to soften or moralise their material for the reader.

Einstürzende Neubauten are a German band formed in West Berlin in 1980, led by Blixa Bargeld. Alongside F.M. Einheit, N.U. Unruh, and others, they built a practice around the use of industrial materials — concrete, pipes, drills, springs, scrap metal — alongside conventional instruments, generating music of extreme physicality and conceptual rigour. Albums including Kollaps (1981), Zeichnungen des Patienten O.T. (1983), and Halber Mensch (1985) defined a strand of industrial music rooted in Berlin's post-war urban landscape. They remain active and continue to expand their collaborative and self-releasing practice.

Born in 1976 in Sendai, Japan, she studied sound engineering in Europe between 1995 and 2004, then returned to Japan to apprentice in Nagauta, the traditional music genre associated with Kabuki and Geisha performance. Based in Huddersfield, UK, she completed a PhD in composition at Huddersfield University in 2015 under Professor Monty Adkins. Her practice centres on text scores, silence, and fragile objects — paper balloons, glass bottles — cultivating quiet temporal experiences within an aesthetics of almost nothing. She has created a series of prose scores called Code of Silence and has collaborated with Eliane Radigue, Tony Conrad, and David Toop.

Born in Tehran in 1967, Farahnaz Hatam is a sound artist, composer, and DJ active in Berlin's experimental music scene. Trained originally in molecular biology, she later studied with minimalist sculptor Robert Morris and pursued algorithmic composition with Sergio Luque, working primarily with SuperCollider. She co-founded N.K., the influential platform and project space in Berlin that operated from 2008 until its closure due to loss of funding. Performing in the duo Hacklander/Hatam and the collaborative project Studio LABOUR, she has received commissions from Sharjah Art Foundation, Martin Gropius Bau, and Berlin Atonal.

Formed in New Orleans in 2016, Special Interest is a four-piece band whose music fuses post-punk noise, industrial electronics, and dance music with an explicitly queer politics. The group consists of vocalist Alli Logout, guitarist Maria Elena, bassist Nathan Cassiani, and synthesist and drum programmer Ruth Mascelli, all of whom are queer and half of whom are people of colour. Their confrontational live performances quickly drew attention within New Orleans queer and punk communities before broader recognition followed. Their third album Endure received a Best New Music designation from Pitchfork and four stars from The Guardian.

Sshe Retina Stimulants is a Japanese noise and dark ambient project. Releasing on Hospital Productions and Alarm, their recordings combine dense electronic noise with atmospheric and textural elements — building soundscapes that sit between harsh noise and dark ambient, occupying the space where extreme sonic density meets meditative durational music. They are part of the Japanese noise underground, maintaining connections with international noise networks while developing a sound that draws on both Japanese noise tradition and European dark ambient aesthetics.

Jesse Paul Miller is a Canadian sound artist and musician whose practice is rooted in extended field recording and radio art. His recordings document the sound environments of Southeast Asia gathered between 2008 and 2017, compiled on Dream Boxes and Psychic Microphones (2024). Working across cassettes, radio broadcasts, telephone exchanges, and environmental sound, he captures the acoustic texture of urban and rural life across countries including Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Myanmar. His approach combines documentary impulse with compositional sensitivity, allowing the material to accumulate its own internal logic through juxtaposition and duration.

German artist born in 1945 whose practice spans sound art, installation, and visual work. His work is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, situating him within a tradition of postwar experimental art. Active across contexts connecting visual art and sonic inquiry, Rosz has been recognised internationally and appears on specialist labels documenting avant-garde practice. His work engages questions of material presence and perceptual attention across a sustained career, bridging sculptural thinking with acoustic exploration in ways that resist easy categorisation within either discipline.

Born in Prague in 1955, he is a Czech sound artist, curator, and educator active in independent music, visual art, and media culture since the early 1980s. He founded the Center for Metamedia at Plasy Monastery in 1991, running an international multidisciplinary residency programme there until 1999. He curated contemporary and media art at the National Gallery in Prague from 1997 to 2000, and in 2009 co-initiated the ongoing Sounds of Prague project with Peter Cusack, dedicated to the psychogeography and soundscapes of the city. He teaches media art history at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.

Born in Silver Spring, Maryland in 1970 and based in Oslo, Norment is a multimedia artist who works with sound, installation, sculpture, and performance through what she terms cultural psychoacoustics: the examination of social phenomena through sound. She founded the Camille Norment Trio in 2010, an ensemble featuring glass armonica, hardingfele, and electric guitar. In 2015 the Office for Contemporary Art Norway selected her to represent the country at the Venice Biennale, where she presented Rapture. She received the Nam June Paik Award in 2023.

İlhan Mimaroğlu (1926–2012) was a Turkish-American composer and producer based in New York. Trained as an architect in Istanbul and later in musicology at Columbia University, he became a central figure at Atlantic Records, where he produced jazz albums by Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, and others while pursuing an independent career in electroacoustic and tape music. His own compositions — released on the Atlantic imprint Finnadar — combined musique concrète, electronic processing, and literary or political texts, frequently engaging Turkish and American political contexts. He collaborated with Jean Dubuffet on the sound work Dhôtel nuancé d'abricot (1974).

Donna Summer (LaDonna Adrian Gaines, 1948–2012) was the defining voice of the disco era, known as the Queen of Disco. Settling in Munich, she met producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte; their 1975 collaboration Love to Love You Baby introduced the extended 12-inch disco mix and became an international sensation. Her subsequent records I Feel Love, Bad Girls, Hot Stuff, and Last Dance cemented her status as the genre's foremost figure. She was the first female artist to have three number one singles in a single calendar year, won five Grammy Awards, and was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013.

Don Bradshaw-Leather moved through the London underground of the early 1970s, leaving behind only a single, self-released double LP in 1972 entitled Distance Between Us. The record — never properly distributed and almost immediately obscure — has accumulated a legendary reputation as one of the most singular artifacts of the British experimental underground, a collision of Krautrock pulse, psychedelic drift, and avant-garde abandonment recorded outside the standard channels of the music industry.

Even without tracing the tangled stories of its making, the music stands with quiet authority.

Based in Saluzzo, Piemonte, Abattoir is a sound artist who works with objects, broken electronics, and extended vocal technique to build noise and electroacoustic music of considerable physical intensity. Active since the mid-2010s, he runs the solo project Nascitari alongside collaborative units including the LACH duo with Clive Henry. His 2023 album Disincarnazione analyses sounds produced by the human body through breathing techniques and close-microphone recording, while Abstersion explores the internal resonance of a prepared upright piano.

Born Bettina Köster in Herford, West Germany on 15 June 1959, she became a central figure in the West Berlin underground after enrolling at the Hochschule der Kunste in 1978. She co-founded the all-female avant-garde band Mania D. in 1979 and that same year started Malaria! with Gudrun Gut, a group that merged minimal electronics, dub rhythms, and confrontational vocals into one of the defining sounds of the era. John Peel described the Malaria! members as his Queens of Noise on a July 1981 broadcast. She later composed for film and released work under the name Autonervous. She died on 16 March 2026.

David Shea (born 1965) is an American composer and turntablist based in New York, associated with the downtown experimental scene and John Zorn's Tzadik label. He developed a practice of composing with vinyl records and turntables as primary instruments, assembling collages from film music, classical recordings, found sound, and pop debris into complex, associative electroacoustic works. His Tzadik releases — particularly Orpheus (1996) and Book of Knives (1994) — are characteristic examples of the downtown approach to sampling as composition. He has collaborated with Zorn, Ikue Mori, and numerous others, and has composed soundtracks for film and dance.

Bernard Fort (born 1953) is a French composer of electroacoustic and musique concrète, and a researcher at GRAME in Lyon. His compositions draw on natural and biological sound sources — particularly birdsong and insect sound — processed through acousmatic techniques into extended works of environmental sonic meditation. He has released on the GRM's Recollection label and other electroacoustic imprints, and has won awards at the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition. His work engages with ecology, listening, and the sonic richness of the natural world.

Jorge Antunes (b. 1942, Rio de Janeiro) is a Brazilian composer and one of Latin America's most important figures in electroacoustic and experimental music. He studied in Paris and worked at the GRM. His pioneering work in developing computer and electronic music infrastructure in Brazil, and his role in founding the country's first electronic music studio at the University of Brasília, make him an essential figure in the history of Brazilian avant-garde music. He has composed important orchestral and chamber music and has taught generations of Brazilian experimental composers.

Minnesota-born and based in Kawasaki, Japan, Terre Thaemlitz is a musician, DJ, writer, and founder of the label Comatonse Recordings whose work combines electronic music with sustained theoretical writing on gender, sexuality, class, and identity. Known also as DJ Sprinkles, they became resident at New York's trans club Sally's II in the early 1990s. The 2008 album Midtown 120 Blues was named Resident Advisor's album of the year and is regarded as a landmark of deep house. Thaemlitz identifies as non-binary and switches pronouns deliberately as part of a critique of gender essentialism.

Oval is the project of Markus Popp, a German musician based in Berlin who emerged in the early 1990s as a key figure in the glitch music movement. Working with deliberately damaged compact discs — running them through players and processing the resulting errors — Popp created looping, shimmering textures that treated digital malfunction as compositional material. Albums Systemisch (1994), 94diskont (1995), and Dok (1995) on Mille Plateaux were foundational to the aesthetics of clicks-and-cuts and post-digital music. After a long hiatus, he returned with the massive Ovalprocess (2010) and has continued releasing work exploring software, error, and musical form.

Tommi Parko is a Finnish musician and a figure in the early Finnish avant-garde and experimental music scene. His work appears on Arktinen Hysteria: Suomi-avantgarden esipuutarhureita (2001), the compilation documenting foundational tracks of Finnish experimental and electronic music. His contributions — including a collaboration with M.A. Numminen and Pekka Kujanpää on Eleitä kolmelle röyhtäilijälle and his solo piece Hysteriablues — are described as avant-gardistic pranks that capture the playful and transgressive spirit of early Finnish experimental music. His recordings are considered among the precursors of contemporary Finnish experimental practice.

Born in Mexico City in 1985. Researcher, writer, and cultural manager. She holds a Master's degree in Comparative Literature from UNAM and is a doctoral candidate at the same institution. She is director of Casa del Lago and curates the Islas Resonantes series for Radio UNAM. In 2015 she received the Young Creators scholarship from FONCA in the Multimedia category, and in 2018 participated in the curatorial team for Modos de oír at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda.

Born in Curicó, Chile in 1984, Constanza Piña is an artist and researcher known as Corazón de Robota working with DIY electronics, analogue synthesizers built from recycled components, textile antennas, and EMF amplifiers as instruments of feminist and indigenous inquiry. She co-founded Chimbalab, the first media lab in Chile focused on DIY electronics, and since 2013 has developed research into Andean computational systems through her project Khipu, which received an honorary mention at Ars Electronica 2020. She founded the technofeminist collective Cyborgrrrls and later joined Medialabmx in Mexico City.

A student of the Mexican microtonal composer Julián Carrillo, he worked alongside fellow disciple David Espejo Aviles to compose and record the 1973 album Cromometrofonía No.1, released on Discos Pax. The recording features arpa citera—special microtonal vertical harps built by the two composers capable of producing 400 notes in sixteenth-tone intervals—in the tradition of Carrillo's Sonido 13 theory. The album has since been reissued and is regarded as a key document of Mexican experimental and microtonal music from that period.

Kode9 (born Steve Goodman, Scotland) is a British musician, DJ, and theorist based in London. He founded Hyperdub in 2004, which became one of the most influential UK electronic music labels — releasing work by Burial, Laurel Halo, Dean Blunt, Jessy Lanza, and many others. His own music — made with the late vocalist The Spaceape — spans dubstep, grime, and experimental club music, documented on albums including Black Sun (2012). He is also the author of Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (MIT Press, 2010), a foundational text in sound studies.

A self-taught instrument builder and electronics teacher based in London, she creates noise music using homemade synthesisers, hacked hardware, and electrified plant matter. Originally from Poland, she arrived in London around 2009 and entered the city's DIY synth-making scene, going on to develop an expansive practice that spans noise performance, interactive installation, and hardware hacking. Her research engages with the materiality of objects and bodies, and with feminist interventions in technical and electronic culture. She has performed and led workshops at venues including Cafe OTO and Sonic Acts, and has been featured through the SHAPE Platform and the British Music Collection.

Born in Paris in 1951, he holds a doctorate in philosophy from the Sorbonne and founded Heldon in 1974, the pioneering French electronic rock group he led through seven albums before its dissolution in 1978. Deeply shaped by Robert Fripp's guitar work, Klaus Schulze, and the science fiction of Norman Spinrad, Heldon forged a synthesis of electric guitar and synthesizer that was entirely distinctive in French rock. He collaborated with philosopher Gilles Deleuze on Heldon's 1974 debut Electronique Guerilla. After a decade-long hiatus brought on by depression, he resumed recording in the 1990s and has since released a substantial body of solo work and collaborations.

Born in 1938 in Ludwigshafen am Rhein, de la Motte-Haber trained in psychology at the University of Mainz under Albert Wellek before pivoting to musicology. Carl Dahlhaus brought her to the Technische Universität Berlin in 1968, where she was appointed professor of systematic musicology in 1978 and held the position until her retirement in 2005. In 1983 she co-founded the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Musikpsychologie alongside Klaus-Ernst Behne and Günter Kleinen, and her Handbuch der Musikpsychologie (1985) became a landmark reference in the field. Her more than 300 publications established music psychology as a recognised sub-discipline of systematic musicology.

Born Declan Patrick MacManus on 25 August 1954 in London, Elvis Costello took his stage name in 1977, combining Elvis Presley's first name with his mother's maiden name. His debut My Aim Is True appeared that same year; Armed Forces (1979) with the Attractions produced three new wave standards including Oliver's Army. Over a career of more than thirty studio albums he has ranged from country to orchestral pop, maintained songwriting partnerships with Burt Bacharach and Paul McCartney, and received two Grammy Awards and two Ivor Novellos. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2016.

Media artist and critical engineer born in Saint Petersburg and based in Berlin, he has been involved in computer-technology and media-art events internationally since 1999. His practice subjects hardware, firmware, and software to anti-disciplinary experimentation, exposing how network infrastructure shapes the circulation of personal data. In 2011 he co-authored The Critical Engineering Manifesto with Julian Oliver and Gordan Savičić, and is co-founder of the Critical Engineering Working Group at Studio Weise7. His work has received recognition at Ars Electronica, the Japan Media Art Festival, and Transmediale.

Born in Bremen in 1948, this German sound artist studied painting, flute, piano, and electronic music across Hamburg, Graz, Zurich, and Milan before turning to sound installation in the mid-1970s. From 1978 she developed works using electromagnetic induction, and since 2003 her Electrical Walks series has invited audiences to traverse urban environments with custom headphones that make audible the hidden electromagnetic fields of banks, shops, and infrastructure. She is a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin and has held professorships in Berlin, Paris, Saarbrücken, and Oxford.

The Bug is the primary solo project of Kevin Martin, a British musician and producer from Weymouth, Dorset. Active since the late 1980s across industrial hip-hop, dub, jazzcore, dancehall, and dubstep through projects including GOD, Techno Animal, and Curse of the Golden Vampire, Martin's work as The Bug — particularly London Zoo (2008, Ninja Tune) and Angels & Devils (2014) — established him as a central figure in UK bass music. He runs the Pressure label and leads King Midas Sound with Roger Robinson and Kiki Hitomi. Collaborators include Death Grips, Danny Brown, and Dylan Carlson.

Stefan Juster performs under the moniker Jung An Tagen and has established himself as one of the more intellectually rigorous figures in the intersection of contemporary techno and dissociative computer music. His practice develops strategies of physical disorientation and forceful sonic phenomena, encouraging listeners and dancers to calculate and intuit their own position in space and time through the organization of sound.

He has released on labels including Editions Mego and Diagonal, and has performed tirelessly at festivals, testing the boundaries between club music and its dissolution.

Deathprod is the alias of Helge Sten (born 1965), a Norwegian electronic musician, sound artist, and producer based in Oslo. Working with electronics, tape, and digital processing, he constructs slow, physically overwhelming sound environments that sit at the intersection of drone, dark ambient, and electro-acoustic composition. His defining release Treetop Drive (1994) and the later Morals and Dogma (2004) on Rune Grammofon are among the most uncompromising records in the Scandinavian experimental catalogue. He is also a member of Supersilent and has been a key figure in the Oslo experimental scene since the early 1990s, producing and mixing records by numerous Norwegian artists.

The project of New York-based artist Zoe Burke, who worked in power electronics collective Reverse Baptism before launching Sapphogeist. Her self-titled debut cassette appeared on No Rent Records in March 2016, followed by releases on L.I.E.S. Records and BANK NYC. The project moves between abrasive noise, industrial texture, and experimental pop structures, with extended passages of avant-garde sound design sitting alongside unexpected melodic moments. Burke has consistently positioned the project across the edges of underground experimental and club-adjacent music scenes.

Born in Malmö in 1966, Rylander began his musical life as drummer and co-founder of the Gothenburg rock band Union Carbide Productions, whose final album was recorded with Steve Albini in Chicago in 1992. He co-founded the drone and noise project The Skull Defekts with Joachim Nordwall in 2005, the band playing its first show opening for Sunn O))) in Gothenburg. Alongside his band work, Rylander maintains an individual practice as a sound artist, composer, and photographer, exhibiting installation work at venues including Färgfabriken in Stockholm. He has received grants from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee and the Swedish Performing Rights Society STIM, and lives in Gothenburg.

Artur Żmijewski (b. 1966, Warsaw) is a Polish artist and filmmaker known for confrontational video works that probe political, ethical, and social limits through staged situations and documentary methods. Trained as a sculptor at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, he shifted to video and performance-based work in the 1990s, developing a practice that engages critically with disability, collective identity, violence, and political behavior. His key works include 80064 (2004), in which a concentration camp survivor has their number re-inked; Repetition (2005), a re-enactment of the Stanford Prison Experiment shown at the Venice Biennale; and Them (2007), presented at documenta 12.

British artist born in 1964, based in The Hague, trained in sculpture and electronic music, whose practice uses field recording, drawing, video, and sound to map the sensory experience of urban environments. He teaches at the Institute of Sonology of the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. His research projects juxtapose audiovisual material with voice-overs and diagrams, tracing space, movement, magnetic fields, and sound through language. He co-developed Soundtrackcity, a platform investigating the influence of city sound through sound walks, a mobile app, and collaboration with residents, artists, urban planners, and scientists.

Born in Reykjavik in 1961 to Swiss artist Dieter Roth and Icelandic visual artist Sigridur Bjornsdottir, he became a key collaborator in his fathers work, contributing across decades to the material and ephemeral art practices for which Dieter Roth is celebrated. The two worked together on assemblage-based collages made from cardboard studio mats bearing coffee stains and other traces of daily use. In his youth he was also a member of the avant-garde band Bruni BB, which appeared in the documentary Rock in Reykjavik. His collaborative works with Dieter Roth were shown at Hauser and Wirth. He died on 2 January 2026, aged 64.

Born in 1974, the German performance artist and curator has been releasing music and performing internationally since the mid-1990s as part of Schimpfluch-Gruppe alongside Rudolf Eb.er, Dave Phillips, and Joke Lanz. He founded Tochnit Aleph in 1994, publishing musique concrète, sound poetry, artist records, and noise music—working with artists including Hermann Nitsch, Dorothy Iannone, Henri Chopin, and Dieter Roth. Between 2008 and 2021 he ran Rumpsti Pumsti, a Berlin specialist shop for artist records and conceptual sound art. He also performs as Raionbashi and in duo with vocalist Doreen Kutzke.

Born in Tokyo in 1948, he opened his ears to free jazz and improvisation in the late 1960s, co-founding an improvisation series with Tokio Hasegawa in 1967 before joining Takehisa Kosugi's Taj Mahal Travellers in 1969, one of Asia's most uncompromising avant-garde ensembles of the era. He subsequently studied sitar in India, returning to Japan to perform extensively, and shifted toward computer composition around 1979, exploring environmental sound as material. His long trajectory across trumpet, harmonica, percussion, sitar, and synthesizer reflects a restless engagement with global improvisation and early electronic music.

SS was a Japanese punk band formed in 1977 in Kyoto. The band was part of the Kansai no wave scene and was later regarded as the first Japanese hardcore punk band.

SS consisted of Tommy SS on vocals, Jun SS on guitar, Tsuyoshi SS on bass, and Takami SS on drums. The entire recorded output of SS consisted of two live albums, both released years after the performances. The songs on both albums are less than a minute long, with only a single track clocking in at more than two minutes. Most of the songs on these albums are originals, except for covers of “Blitzkrieg Bop” by The Ramones (played at both performances) and “First Time” by The Boys.

Suni Paz is an Argentine-American singer, guitarist, and music educator who has dedicated much of her career to children's music rooted in Latin American folk traditions. Recording for Folkways and Smithsonian Folkways, she has produced albums of folk songs from Argentina, Chile, and other Latin American countries sung for children and families, maintaining the vitality of Spanish-language folk traditions in North American educational contexts. Her work has been recognised as an important contribution to multicultural music education and to the preservation of Latin American folk song.

Born in Ptolemais, Greece in 1974, Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri trained in rhythmic gymnastics before turning to music after an injury. She studied at Goldsmiths College London, collaborated with the improvisation ensemble AMM and Eddie Prévost from 1999 to 2009, and completed her doctorate at the University of California, San Diego in 2008. Her compositions explore resonant surfaces, motorised objects, and the borders between sound art, visual art, and performance. She is an Associate Professor of Music Composition at Cornell University and has received the Dan David Prize for Contemporary Music.

Founded in Porto in 2011, Sonoscopia is a Portuguese cultural association dedicated to the creation, production, and promotion of experimental music, sound art, and their transdisciplinary intersections. Since its inception it has produced over 700 events, artistic projects, educational activities, and publications, with a presence across around twenty European countries as well as the United States, Japan, Lebanon, and Tunisia. Its venue on Rua de Silva Porto houses a dedicated concert hall, exhibition rooms for sound art, and an outdoor stage. Notable projects include the robotic orchestra Phobos and the Microvolumes concert series, which began in 2004.

Christian Zanési (born 1952) is a French composer and producer of electroacoustic and acousmatic music, and former director of the creation department at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in Paris. A student of and successor to François Bayle, he has produced an extensive body of acousmatic works since the 1970s, including the Stop! the Flowers Are Singing series and other long-form compositions that explore the sonic landscape of urban, industrial, and domestic environments. He has also been an important figure in promoting and producing electroacoustic music through his work at INA-GRM.

The Necks are an Australian piano trio formed in Sydney in 1987, consisting of Chris Abrahams on piano, Tony Buck on drums, and Lloyd Swanton on double bass. Their practice is built almost entirely on long-form improvisation: each album is typically a single, unedited piece lasting around an hour, developed from small repeated cells that slowly accumulate and transform.

Their music resists easy categorization. It draws on jazz, minimalism, drone, and ambient music without fully belonging to any of them. The process of gradual, collective evolution produces music of unusual immersive quality, each performance unique and never repeated.

Government Alpha is the harsh noise and power electronics project of Japanese artist Yasutoshi Yoshida, active since the early 1990s and one of the most technically accomplished practitioners of extreme electronic music. Working within the tradition of Japanese noise — a practice associated with artists including Merzbow, Incapacitants, and C.C.C.C. — Yoshida has developed a distinctive approach that applies structural precision to the construction of noise, producing releases of remarkable formal coherence within an apparently chaotic sonic field. His output spans hundreds of releases on labels including Alien8 and RRRecords, maintaining a consistently high standard of craft.

Baudouin Oosterlynck (1938–2019) was a Belgian composer, sound artist, and visual artist. He was one of the earliest figures in Belgian musique concrète and electroacoustic music, working with prepared piano, voice, and found objects from the mid-1970s onward. Much of his material remained unreleased during his lifetime. The compilation 1975–1978 (Metaphon, 2020) gathered recordings of prepared piano and voice, most previously unreleased, presenting a significant figure in European experimental music who had worked largely in isolation from mainstream institutional recognition. Refuge, recorded in that period, exemplifies his approach to raw acoustic material.

The Revolutionaries were a Jamaican reggae session band that served as the house band at Channel One Studio in Kingston throughout the late 1970s. Anchored by drummer Sly Dunbar and frequently including bassist Robbie Shakespeare, keyboardist Ansel Collins, and others, they defined the rockers style of reggae — heavy, slower, more syncopated rhythms that replaced the earlier rocksteady bounce with greater weight and intensity. Recording for the Mighty Two (Joe Gibbs and Errol Thompson) production team, they backed virtually every significant Jamaican artist of the period and their rhythm tracks were the foundation of hundreds of releases across dozens of labels.

Shaahin Saba Dipole is an Iranian musician and electronic music artist whose work explores the intersection of Persian classical music traditions — including the dastgah modal system and the santoor and tar instruments — with contemporary electronic production and experimental composition. Working in Iran or in Iranian diaspora communities, his practice situates Persian musical heritage within an international framework of experimental sound. The project name references both a personal name and a physics term, suggesting an interest in the tension or polarity between cultural traditions and modernity.

Pierre Schaeffer (1910–1995) was a French composer, theorist, and broadcaster who founded musique concrète — the practice of composing directly with recorded sounds — at the French Radio (RTF) in Paris in 1948. His Études de bruits (1948) and the Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950, with Pierre Henry) are founding documents of electroacoustic music. He also developed a comprehensive theory of sonic objects through his Traité des objets musicaux (1966), which remains a central text in electroacoustic theory. He founded the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in 1958, which became one of the most important institutional centres for electroacoustic music globally.

A collaboration between Birmingham techno producers Anthony Child (Surgeon) and Karl O'Connor (Regis), British Murder Boys began in 2002 and drew on the duo's shared roots in post-punk, industrial, and hardcore to push club music toward its confrontational extremes. They released six 12-inch records and a handful of remixes before disbanding in 2006, then reunited for a release on Mute's Liberation Technologies in 2012. Both are co-founders of Downwards Records, which they established in 1993 and which became one of the defining labels for dark, industrial-inflected Birmingham techno.

Augusto de Campos (b. 1931) is a Brazilian poet, translator, and critic, and one of the founders of the Noigandres group, which launched the concrete poetry movement in Brazil in the 1950s. Alongside his brother Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari, he developed a poetics treating words as visual and sonic material arranged on the page.

His work extends into digital and audiovisual poetry, sound experiments, and translations of poets including Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, and Arnaut Daniel. De Campos's collaborations with Brazilian musicians, including Caetano Veloso, helped carry concrete poetry's ideas into popular song and tropicália.

Formed in London in 1975 by manager Malcolm McLaren to promote his King's Road clothing boutique Sex, the band — vocalist John Lydon, guitarist Steve Jones, drummer Paul Cook, and bassist Glen Matlock — became the focal point of British punk within a year. Their profanity-laced live television appearance in December 1976 caused a national scandal, and the 1977 single 'God Save the Queen', released to coincide with the Queen's Silver Jubilee, was banned by the BBC. Their sole studio album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols appeared in October 1977, and the band dissolved in January 1978 after a disastrous US tour.

Mark Vernon is a Scottish sound artist and musician based in Glasgow, known for his use of found audio tapes and reel-to-reel recordings. Working with discarded cassettes purchased from charity shops and collected from relatives, he builds layered compositions from the unintended domestic recordings — voices, music, ambient sound — of anonymous people. His releases on Chocolate Monk and other British independent labels treat found tape as both musical material and archive of private life. His practice occupies a space between concrete music, documentary sound, and audio art, with a strong sense of warmth and human curiosity about the people whose voices he encounters.

Anton Bruhin (b. 1949, Switzerland) is a Swiss musician, artist, and poet associated with Fluxus and experimental traditions. He is best known for his work with the Maultrommel (jaw harp or mouth harp), of which he is an internationally recognized virtuoso, and for his contributions to graphic scores, visual poetry, and experimental sound in the Swiss context.

Bruhin has developed an extensive practice around the sonic possibilities of small, often overlooked instruments, and his performances typically combine musical improvisation with a playful, Fluxus-influenced approach to action and material.

Pefkin is the musical persona of Gayle Brogan, a Sheffield-based artist working with voice, acoustic and electronic instruments, and a ritualistic approach to composition rooted in the landscape and mythology of the British Isles. Her work moves through psychedelic folk, drone, and neo-ceremonial music, often responding to specific geographical and folkloric material. She has contributed to the Folklore Tapes Ceremonial County Series, with Norfolk: The Lantern Man (2024) responding to the East Anglian legend of the Ignis Fatuus. She also performs and records as one half of the duo Pumajaw with John Cavanagh.

Helm is the project of Luke Younger, a British producer and label founder based in London who has developed a body of work across industrial texture, club rhythm, and esoteric source material since the late 2000s. His recordings on PAN — including Impossible Symmetry (2014) and Olympic Mess (2016) — combine hard-edged electronic production with processed sound sources, drone, and aggressive rhythmic structures at an uncomfortable angle to techno and noise. He runs Alter, a London label releasing music by Raime, Karen Gwyer, and others. His practice engages with occult imagery, hermetic symbolism, and dark margins of folklore, brought into contact with contemporary experimental production.

Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante is a Mapuche scholar, musician, and filmmaker. Associate Professor of Spanish and Director of the Program in Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, he is also a founding member of Comunidad de Historia Mapuche, a collective of Mapuche researchers and activists based in southern Chile. His research addresses sound studies, colonialism, and decolonization, culminating in Acoustic Colonialism: Acts of Mapuche Interference (Duke University Press). His music and film work has been presented internationally.

Born in Austria in 1960, he is a New York-based artist whose practice centres on immersive audiovisual environments that push perception to its limits. He co-founded the duo Granular-Synthesis in 1992, working until 2003 on performances combining extreme video processing and high-intensity sound. His solo series—ZEE, FEED, SOL, and SUB—fill gallery spaces with fog, stroboscopic light, and dense audio to induce states of perceptual dissolution. He has exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, PS1 New York, and ZKM Karlsruhe, and received the Qwartz New Media Art Award in Paris in 2010.

Matana Roberts is an American sound experimentalist, alto saxophonist, clarinetist, composer, and visual artist born in 1975 on the South Side of Chicago, based in New York. A former member of the AACM and the Black Rock Coalition, their major work is Coin Coin — a multi-chapter long-form project exploring memory, ancestry, and history, released on Constellation Records. Chapters include Gens de Couleur Libres (2011), Mississippi Moonchile, River Run Thee (2015), and Memphis (2019). Roberts also co-led the trio Sticks and Stones with Chad Taylor and Joshua Abrams.

Brian Jungen (b. 1970) is a Canadian artist of Dane-zaa First Nations and Swiss descent based in British Columbia. His practice transforms mass-produced consumer goods into works that interrogate the relationship between indigenous and Western material cultures, identity, and globalisation. His Prototypes for New Understanding series — ceremonial masks assembled from dismantled Nike Air Jordan trainers — are among the most discussed works in contemporary Canadian art, using Northwest Coast forms to analyse the aesthetics of sports consumer culture. Subsequent works transform golf bags, baseball gloves, and chest freezers into whale skeletons, extending this method of critical transformation.

Clément Vercelletto is a French musician, composer, and stage director born in 1981 in Lyon. He trained in clarinet, then Malinké percussion and African traditional music at the ENM Villeurbanne, followed by electroacoustic composition at CRR Lyon. His practice connects club music and avant-garde composition — as in the Kaumwald project — and extends into work with choreographers and stage directors. He teaches at ENSAV Lacambre in Brussels and is associated with French music research centres GRAME, GMEM, and GMEA. His album L'Engoulevent was composed on a small electronic organ whose pipes were replaced by bird calls via custom MIDI controller.

Honorio Quila is a Chilean poet and performer of canto a lo poeta, a form of sung poetry rooted in the rural traditions of Chile's Central Valley. Practised across all-night gatherings and religious festivals, canto a lo poeta combines guitar or guitarrón with improvised and traditional verses on divine and secular themes. Quila's work is documented on Canto a Lo Divino (Mississippi Records, 2023), a compilation capturing the sacred dimensions of this tradition as practised by a community of men and women in vocal exchange. His practice connects pre-Columbian, Spanish colonial, and contemporary Chilean folk traditions.

Lydia Kavina (born 1967) is a Russian thereminist and composer, the great-great-niece of Lev Theremin and one of the instrument's most accomplished living practitioners. She began studying with Theremin himself as a child and has since developed a technical and musical command widely regarded as among the finest in the world. She has performed with orchestras internationally, championing both the theremin repertoire and new commissions, and has worked as a consultant and performer on numerous film soundtracks. Her recordings for Decca and other labels document a practice that honours the instrument's history while expanding its contemporary possibilities.

Gangpol und Mit are a French duo formed in Bordeaux in 2000, comprising Renaud Pion and Sébastien Mingam. Working with obsolete game hardware — Game Boy, Atari ST, NES — alongside acoustic instruments and voice, they developed a childlike, absurdist electronic pop that draws on chiptune aesthetics, experimental composition, and comedy. Their albums, including Cracker Mash (2010) and extensive Bandcamp and cassette releases, are characterised by dense layering, playful dissonance, and an irreverence toward both electronic music conventions and the nostalgia culture around vintage game technology.

Born in 1966 in Seattle, Mark Bain studied at the Cornish College of Art, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and completed a Master of Science in Visual Studies at MIT in 1998, before undertaking a two-year residency at the Rijksacademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, where he has since remained. His site-specific installations use seismic sensors, transducers, and purpose-built machinery to amplify the latent vibrations of buildings and architectural structures, turning them into sonic instruments from within. He grew up in an architectural family and positions his work as that of an anti-architect.

Michael Jackson (1958–2009) was an American singer, songwriter, and dancer whose recordings and performances established him as the most commercially successful entertainer of the twentieth century. Born the eighth of ten children in Gary, Indiana, he performed as part of The Jackson 5 from early childhood before launching a solo career that peaked with Thriller (1982) — the best-selling album in history — Off the Wall (1979), and Bad (1987).

His collaboration with producers Quincy Jones and later Teddy Riley produced recordings that combined soul, funk, disco, and pop into a mainstream form of enormous power and precision.

Aaron Dilloway is an American noise artist and the founder of Hanson Records, one of the most important independent labels in American experimental and noise music. A former member of Wolf Eyes, Dilloway later developed a solo practice centred on tape manipulation, homemade electronics, and circuit-bending. His recordings treat magnetic tape as a living medium, subjecting it to loops and degradation that transform recorded material into dense hallucinatory constructions. Albums including Modern Jester (2012), a double LP regarded as his most ambitious release, established him as one of noise's most distinctive voices, while Hanson's storefront anchors a wider community of practitioners.

Timm Ulrichs (b. 1940) is a German conceptual artist based in Hanover and Münster, one of the central figures in German Fluxus and concept art since the early 1960s. His practice has always foregrounded language, tautology, and self-reference — works that point to themselves, frame the artist's own body, or make visible the apparatus of art production.

Ulrichs describes himself as the "first living work of art" — a position he has maintained consistently, making his own body, name, and biography central to the work. He has produced artist books, editions, text-based works, actions, and installations that circulate internationally, often through small presses and mail art networks.

Born in Istanbul in 1973, he is a musician, improviser, and sound designer based in Berlin, where he has lived since 2014. His performance system, Omnibus, uses custom-designed instruments that process concrete sounds, field recordings, and samples in real time via various physical controllers. He is a founding member of Islak Köpek, regarded as the group that initiated the free improvisation scene in Turkey. His collaborative audiovisual work The Threshold, made with Sydney-based video artist Fabian Astore, won the Blake Prize in Australia in 2012.

Oswald Wiener (1935-2021) was a radical Austrian writer, cyberneticist, and artist, known for his experimental work with the Vienna Group (Wiener Gruppe), authoring the novel Die Verbesserung von Mitteleuropa (The Improvement of Central Europe) and exploring themes of cybernetics, language, and art in complex, influential texts and projects like the “Bio-Adapter”. He studied diverse subjects, played jazz, worked in data processing for Olivetti, and later taught, leaving a legacy as a profound critic of conventional science and art. Team of Jeremy Roht, West Dawson, Yukon-Territory was released by Supposé in 2001.

Catherine Christer Hennix was a Swedish mathematician, composer, and visual artist known for her work in minimalist music, as well as her research in topology and mathematical logic. She was a key figure in the 1960s–70s avant-garde scene, collaborating with La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, and the Fluxus movement, creating drone-based compositions that explore extended duration, just intonation, and meditative sound structures. Hennix was affiliated with MIT’s AI Lab in the late 1970s and was later employed as a research professor of mathematics at SUNY New Paltz; she also worked with mathematician Alexander Esenin-Volpin.

Ludus Pinsky is the alias of Lapo Lombardi, an Italian synthesizer musician and instrument builder raised in a musical family and shaped early by an EMS AKS synthesizer. He is a partner in The Analog Session, an electronic music project formed in 2009 with Maurizio Dami (Alexander Robotnick), performing entirely on vintage analog synthesizers and improvising from a 1970s aesthetic extended into contemporary electronic sensibility. Albums including April, Black Ground, and When Machines Get Funky are released on Hot Elephant Music.

Born in 1979 and based in the Netherlands, he is an artist and researcher who studied Interactive Media and Environments at the Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen. Working at the intersection of video circuit-bending, hardware hacking, and glitch art, he builds hand-modified video samplers, sync generators, and descramblers whose visual output responds dynamically to audio feeds. He has exhibited at Transmediale and Sonic Acts, and has built custom video hardware for touring musicians including Portishead and Motorpsycho. His work treats electronic failure and signal instability as generative aesthetic material rather than problems to be corrected.

Alexander Gornon is a Russian poet and sound artist associated with the neo-Futurist and experimental poetry movements in Russia. His practice involves transforming text and voice through computer processing to create what he calls poem-operas, works that treat language as sonic material as much as semantic content. He has contributed to international sound poetry anthologies including the Homo Sonorus collection, and his 1998 sound work Ne-Ve-Promoi-Ki-Shkoj-Tzara appeared in anthologies of Russian sound poetry. He has collaborated with musicians including Sergey Letov and performed at experimental festivals in Russia.

Květy (Czech for Flowers) is a Czech indie rock and experimental pop band from Brno, led by singer and songwriter Jan P. Muchow. Active since the mid-2000s, they have developed a reputation in the Czech underground for emotionally rich, often theatrical songs that draw on indie rock, post-punk, and art song traditions. Their albums on Polí5 and other Czech independent labels have received critical attention for their formal ambition and lyrical depth within a small but vibrant Czech independent music scene.

Born in 1965 in Karl-Marx-Stadt, now Chemnitz, this German artist and musician works under his own name as a visual artist and as Alva Noto as an electronic musician. His music pursues a reductive engagement with acoustics, digital signals, and visual structure, and his label NOTON, later merged into Raster-Noton, was central to the development of minimal electronic music. Collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto have included the co-score for The Revenant in 2015. He has held a professorship at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts since 2015.

Pekka Kujanpää is a Finnish musician associated with the early Finnish avant-garde and experimental music scene documented on Arktinen Hysteria: Suomi-avantgarden esipuutarhureita (2001). He collaborated with M.A. Numminen and Tommi Parko on Eleitä kolmelle röyhtäilijälle, a work that exemplifies the playful, transgressive spirit of 1960s–70s Finnish experimental practice. His recordings represent some of the earliest attempts in Finland to develop an avant-garde music practice that engaged with Fluxus, concrete music, and experimental sound in a distinctly Finnish cultural context.

Mam Tuxtla Chico refers to the musical traditions of the Mam-speaking Maya community of Tuxtla Chico, a municipality in Chiapas, Mexico near the Guatemalan border. The Mam people are one of the largest Maya-language groups in Guatemala and southern Mexico, with rich ceremonial and folk music traditions including marimba, flute, drum, and ensemble vocal music tied to the agricultural and Catholic festival calendar. Recordings of Mam music from this region have been made by Mexican cultural institutions and released as part of series documenting Mexico's Indigenous musical heritage.

Born in Chicago and raised between Seoul and Seattle, the Berlin-based DJ and producer began making electronic music at thirteen, first as Fugal before the D.Dan project emerged as a more spontaneous outlet. A visit to Berghain in 2013 redirected his trajectory toward underground techno; he subsequently relocated to Berlin, where he became a resident of Mala Junta, one of the city's fiercest underground parties connecting 1990s rave energy with queer community culture. His releases on Lobster Theremin, Arsenik, Amniote Editions, and KAOS mix slamming funky techno with slippery psychedelia and spitting acid lines.

Tim Hodgkinson (born 1949) is a British musician and composer, co-founder of the influential avant-rock group Henry Cow in 1968 alongside Fred Frith. As Henry Cow's clarinettist, keyboard player, and co-composer, he helped develop the group's distinctive fusion of free improvisation, modern classical composition, and politically informed rock. After Henry Cow dissolved in 1978 he continued with a solo career spanning improvised electroacoustic music, extended chamber works, and ethnomusicological research into the music of Tuva and Siberia. His compositions have been performed internationally and he has collaborated with many figures in the European and global experimental scene.

Born in Brooklyn in 1936, Malcolm Goldstein studied composition at Columbia University under Otto Luening and became an early participant in New York's experimental avant-garde, co-founding the Tone Roads Ensemble with James Tenney and Philip Corner in the 1960s and contributing to the Judson Dance Theater. His practice centres on what he calls "soundings" — structured improvisations for solo violin that use graphic scores combining notation, calligraphy, and instruction to probe the instrument's full expressive range. Critics have described his approach as having reinvented violin playing. His book Sounding the Full Circle documents this practice.

Born and raised in Irkutsk, Siberia, Kraviz hosted a local radio show and held a Friday night residency before moving to Moscow to study dentistry. She attended the Red Bull Music Academy in Melbourne in 2006 and released a self-titled debut album on Rekids in February 2012. In 2014 she launched her own label трип (Trip), devoted to raw, acid-inflected techno and punk-spirited club music. She mixed the forty-eighth DJ-Kicks album in January 2015 and contributed original music and a voice cameo to the game Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020.

Tim Bruniges is a Sydney-based artist and musician whose practice spans installation, sound, and video. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Music with distinction from the University of Western Sydney, a Master of Fine Arts from COFA, UNSW, and a PhD on live sound installation practice, supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award.

His site-responsive works use live input, amplification, and feedback to foreground listening as a public, embodied act, and have been shown across Australia, the US, UK, Belgium, Germany, France, Iceland, Russia, and Dubai. A founding member of the band The Dead Sea, he also collaborates with Sarah Mosca on the project Survey of Sound.

Founder of the Amsterdam-based Staalplaat network in 1982, he has built one of experimental music and sound art most enduring platforms, encompassing a record label, the cassette imprint Staaltape, a shop, and the Staalplaat Soundsystem. Born in 1959, his artistic practice amplifies and repurposes everyday objects — consumer appliances, trees, trains, cars — to generate unexpected sonic and spatial qualities. Staalplaat Soundsystem, active since 2000, creates large-scale outdoor sound art installations in industrial and urban public spaces. He received the Witteveen+Bos Art and Technology Award in 2014.

Dieter Roth (1930–1998) was a Swiss-German artist born in Hannover. One of the most restlessly prolific artists of the twentieth century, his practice ranged across artist's books, prints, drawings, paintings, film and video works, and sculptures made from perishable food materials — chocolate, sausage, cheese — that deliberately decayed over time, incorporating entropy and biological change as aesthetic processes.

He was a member of the improvisational ensemble Selten Gehörte Musik alongside Oswald Wiener, Gerhard Rühm, H.C. Artmann and Dominik Steiger, recording an enormous archive of collective improvisation in informal domestic settings from 1973 to 1978.

Born in Kingston, Ontario in 1956 and trained in physics before graduating in music from Mount Allison University in 1980, this Canadian sound artist and composer has built a practice around the acoustical extremes of the piano, natural forces, and electronically mediated environments. His Speaker Swinging (1982) generates Doppler Effect trance music through physical performance. Long Aeolian Piano (1984–88) harnesses wind through string installations, while Aquaeolian Whirlpool (1990) uses water vortices. He won First Prize at the 1984 CBC National Radio Competition for Young Composers and was DAAD artist-in-residence in Berlin from 1992 to 1993.

Chilean composer and acoustic engineer (20 July 1933 – 11 January 2017) who was among the first in Latin America to compose fully electronic music, with his 1959 Variaciones Espectrales considered the earliest exclusively electronic Chilean work. In 1978 he completed the COMDASUAR, a custom digital-analogue computer he designed independently for music creation, making him an absolute pioneer in computer music. He was a professor of acoustics and electroacoustics at the University of Chile and founded the Sound Technology degree there in 1969, shaping generations of electroacoustic composers.

Moscow-based transdisciplinary artist and engineer born in 1986 who works as ::vtol::, creating robotic instruments, noise machines, and interactive installations that link emergent systems with technological synthesis. His practice centres on circuit bending—deliberately bringing microcircuits to extreme and unconventional operating modes. Works include a robotic dulcimer that reads brainwaves via EEG headset, a device converting encoded tattoos to noise, a twelve-arm robotic installation conducted by hand gestures, and Volnovod, a motor-driven wire sculpture evoking Soviet space technology. His work has been recognised at Ars Electronica and exhibited internationally.

Born in Santiago de Chile in 1975, she holds a degree in Visual Arts from the University of Chile and a Master in Artistic Productions and Research from the University of Barcelona. Her practice centers on sonic-visual-corporeal connections explored through analog and digital technologies, assembled into what she calls sound-visual assemblages. She has exhibited and performed at major venues including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid and the Tsonami Sound Art Festival in Valparaiso. Her work is rooted in a childhood habit of collecting cassettes, old televisions, and discarded electronic objects.

Kenichi Kanazawa is a Japanese sound artist and musician working with electronics and performance in experimental music contexts. His practice investigates the sonic possibilities of electronic instruments through live performance and recording. Active in Japanese experimental music communities, he has contributed to events and festivals dedicated to experimental sound. His work reflects sustained attention to the material dimensions of electronic sound and the ways in which specific sonic situations create distinctive experiences for performers and listeners.

The Legendary Pink Dots are a British and Dutch psychedelic and experimental group formed in London in 1980, led by vocalist and songwriter Edward Ka-Spel alongside synthesiser player The Silver Man (Phil Knight). Active continuously since their formation, they have produced a vast body of work across dozens of albums drawing on progressive rock, electronic music, psychedelia, post-punk, and ambient in a hybrid approach marked by Ka-Spel's surreal, dark, and intimate lyrical voice. Their self-funded practice — recording on their own Terminal Kaleidoscope label alongside work for Nettwerk and Play It Again Sam — reflects a commitment to direct artistic control sustained across four decades.

Born in Belgium in 1972, this Brussels-based artist builds sound installations that investigate the physical and spatial behaviour of acoustic energy through kinetic sculpture and neural interfaces. In one recurring installation visitors wear EEG headsets whose alpha and beta wave readings activate hammers that strike large steel plates hung from the ceiling, creating rhythmic sound environments shaped by the listener's own brain activity. Between 2013 and 2022 he served as co-artistic director of Overtoon, the Brussels platform for sound art, alongside Aernoudt Jacobs.

Maia Urstad is a Norwegian sound artist whose practice centers on radios, tape recorders, and obsolete media technology, using these devices in installation contexts that investigate memory, time, and the politics of communication. Based in Bergen, she has developed a sustained body of work that treats obsolete electronic media not as nostalgic artifacts but as active repositories of historical experience.

Her installations typically use multiple radios or tape recorders simultaneously, creating layered acoustic environments in which fragments of broadcast speech, music, and static intersect and interact.

Born in 1964, Alberto de Campo is a composer and computational artist based in Berlin. He is Prefessor for Generative and Computational Art at the Institute for Time-Based Media at UdK. He studied composition with Georg Haas and Beat Furrer, and electronic music with Curtis Roads. His practice spans computer music, audiovisual performance, and the sonification of scientific data. Notable works include SurveillanceSuite (2017) and Polypalimpsestinator (2013–15), and he contributed to Multiverse Crosstalk Radio at documenta 14. He is also a member of The Society for Nontrivial Pursuits.

Slovak artist, writer, and researcher born in Bratislava, he founded Monoskop in 2004—initially a wiki documenting media art in Bratislava, which grew into one of the most substantial collaborative digital libraries in the fields of arts, humanities, and experimental culture. He studied networked media at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam and completed a 2024 PhD at the University of Amsterdam on publishing as a conservation strategy for contemporary art. His broader practice spans research, curation, and exhibition-making across Eastern Europe, including contributions to Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc at the Walker Art Center.

Nick Hoffman is an American musician, label operator, and sound artist based in Chicago. He runs the Pilgrim Talk label, which has released a significant body of work in American experimental and free improvisation since the 2000s. As a musician he works in noise, drone, and free improvisation, often using self-constructed or found instruments and electronics. He has collaborated with many figures in the American experimental underground and his label has been a consistent platform for unconventional, difficult music that occupies spaces between noise, improvisation, and composition.

Marta Zapparoli is an Italian sound artist based in Berlin whose practice spans electromagnetic field recording, radio interception, magnetic tape, and live electronics. Drawing on invisible frequencies — radio waves, electromagnetic emissions, interference — she constructs dense, immersive performances and recordings that make audible the hidden electrical life of environments and technologies. Her work sits within the traditions of noise, experimental electronics, and radiophonic art, and she has performed and exhibited widely across Europe, collaborating with sound artists, musicians, and visual practitioners.

Achim Wollscheid is a German sound and media artist based in Frankfurt whose installations and performances investigate the intricate relationships between sound, architecture, light and social space. Using systems that convert light, movement or environmental data into sound, along with feedback loops and site-specific interventions, he transforms everyday environments into resonant, interactive acoustic experiences. Rather than traditional concerts, his work often unfolds in gallery or public settings, questioning perception and the boundaries between public and private sonic territories.

Robert Ashley (1930–2014) was an American composer central to the development of American music theatre, electronic music, and opera. Co-founder of the ONCE Festival in Ann Arbor in the 1960s alongside Gordon Mumma and others, he later became associated with the Mills College scene and the experimental opera movement. His television opera Perfect Lives (1984), a seven-episode work for television that combined ambient keyboards, Ashley's spoken-sung text, and a deliberately everyday American setting, remains among the most radical works of operatic theatre. Subsequent long-form operas including Atalanta (Acts of God) and Now Eleanor's Idea extended this approach across decades of activity.

Yuk Hui (b. 1985, Hong Kong) is a philosopher of technology whose work on cosmotechnics — the question of different cultural and historical relationships to technology — has made him one of the most discussed and influential philosophers working today on questions at the intersection of technology, culture, and politics. He trained in computer science before turning to philosophy, studying at Goldsmiths, College London, and subsequently with Bernard Stiegler.

Vinyl-terror & -horror is the ongoing collaboration of Camilla Sørensen (b. 1978) and Greta Christensen (b. 1977), both of whom graduated from the Royal Danish Art Academy in Copenhagen in 2007. Their practice treats the turntable as a sculptural instrument: vinyl records are physically broken and reassembled as cut-up collages, looped and interrupted to produce unexpected rhythmic and textural structures. Installations often combine these sound-sculptures with samples from 1960s horror films, kinetic objects, and dramatic lighting, building post-apocalyptic atmospheres infused with dark humour.

Zos Kia was a British noise and industrial project active from 1982 to 1983, formed by John Gosling and John Balance (born Geoffrey Rushton, 1962–2004), with Peter Christopherson contributing sound. Their sole release Transparent — a cassette on the Austrian Nekrophile label (1983) — stands as one of the earliest documents of the aesthetic that Balance and Christopherson would develop as Coil from 1984 onward. The project name is drawn from Austin Osman Spare's Zos Kia Cultus. John Balance died in November 2004; Christopherson died in 2010.

Mexico City-based researcher, curator, and sound artist who studied philosophy and aesthetics at UNAM, where he is completing doctoral work. His practice examines the archive and its relationship to modernity through radio art and sound installation, including the 25-episode documentary 1978, the Year We Live in Danger for Radio UNAM and the headphone intervention Radiograms of Modernity for the Museo Nacional de Arte. He co-founded the platform OPE3RA with Mario de Vega and curated Constellations of the Audio Machine in Mexico, shown in Germany in 2017.

Diana Deutsch is a British-American cognitive psychologist and music researcher based at the University of California, San Diego. Her work has produced foundational discoveries in the psychology of music and auditory perception, including the tritone paradox, the scale illusion, and the octave illusion — phenomena that reveal how the brain processes and organises musical sound. She has published recordings of auditory demonstrations that double as both scientific tools and musical experiences in their own right, and her work bridges music cognition and experimental composition. Speech to Song Illusion (2003) demonstrates how language can transform into perceived melody through repetition.

Mexican electronic musician and producer based in Tijuana. He is a co-founder of Nortec Collective and performs under the alias Bostich, individually as Bostich+Fussible. Over more than thirty years he has developed a hybrid sound fusing the brass and accordion textures of norteño and banda with electronic production and club rhythms, earning two International Grammy nominations and three Latin Grammy nominations. His music has appeared in campaigns for Volvo, Audi, and Cirque du Soleil, and he remains a central figure in Tijuana's internationally recognised electronic music scene.

The Xhosa and Mpondo are Bantu-speaking peoples of the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, known for musical traditions including the distinctive split-tone singing technique — isigqi or overtone singing — practised by women, as well as bow instruments including the umrhubhe and uhadi. Recordings of these traditions have appeared on Ocora, Lyrichord, and Rounder Records labels. The Mpondo, a subgroup of the Nguni peoples, share many musical traditions with their Xhosa neighbours. These recordings document practices that informed later ethnomusicological research into African vocal polyphony and resonant instrument design.

A pioneer of noise in Mexico City, he launched the Ruido Horrible blog in 2005 as one of the first Spanish-language platforms dedicated to reviewing and documenting experimental and radical music, accumulating over five hundred reviews and interviews. The blog evolved into the Ruido Horrible label, releasing around eighty limited-edition productions spanning harsh noise, industrial, and sound experimentation. His solo project Heraldos Negros, begun in 2007 and named after a César Vallejo poem, centres harsh noise built from piezoelectric transducers, modular synthesis, magnetic tapes, and discarded objects. He also co-founded the noise group Amniosis in 2004.

Sudden Infant is the project of Swiss artist Joke Lanz (born 1964), active since the mid-1980s in performance art, noise, and electroacoustic music. His practice combines extreme body performance, text, and noise in a confrontational and often self-directed assault — recordings of bodily sounds, improvisations with contact microphones on the body, and theatrical performances. No Is E is a related project extending these ideas through further electronic treatment. Lanz has released extensively on Odd Size, No Fun Productions, and other labels and has collaborated with Dieter Roth, Seth Cooke, and many others.

Tania Aedo is a Mexican cultural producer and curator with a long trajectory in the development of projects at the crossroads of art, science, and technology. She is currently coordinator of the Max Aub Chair, Transdiscipline in Art and Technology at UNAM, and is a fellow of CIFAR (Canadian Institute for Advanced Research) for the collective project Future Flourishing.

She directed the Laboratorio Arte Alameda and the Multimedia Center of the Centro Nacional de las Artes in Mexico City, positions from which she developed curatorial programs that established Mexico City as a significant center for media art and the intersection of technology and contemporary practice.

Tempat Angker (haunted or eerie place in Indonesian/Malay) is a project exploring ceremonial, spectral, and traditional music from Indonesia and the broader Malay-speaking world. The name suggests an engagement with the supernatural dimensions of Indonesian musical culture — including gamelan and other ritual music associated with spirits, healing, and the boundary between living and dead. Such music has been documented on Sublime Frequencies and related labels, and the project name evokes both the sonic atmosphere of Indonesian ritual music and the liminal spaces it is intended to occupy.

The Human League is a British synth-pop group formed in Sheffield in 1977 by Martyn Ware, Ian Craig Marsh, Philip Oakey, and Adrian Wright. Their early recordings explored a cold, angular electronic sound informed by Kraftwerk, releasing Reproduction (1979) and Travelogue (1980) before Ware and Marsh departed to form Heaven 17. The reconstituted group produced Dare (1981), one of the most commercially successful and enduring albums of the new wave era. Its single Don't You Want Me defined synthesiser-based pop. The group's influence on subsequent electronic pop, from the Pet Shop Boys to later synth revivalists, secured Sheffield's place in British electronic music history.

Dat Politics is a French electronic duo comprising Gaël Segalen and Claude Eveno, based in Paris, releasing on Chicks on Speed's Chicks on Speed Records and later Tigerbeat6. Their music combines hyperactive IDM, electro, and digital pop with a cheerfully chaotic energy — fractured rhythms, cartoon textures, and an exuberance that distinguished them from the more austere European electronic mainstream of the early 2000s. Albums including Plugs Plus (2000) and Tracasseur (2002) were well-regarded in experimental and independent electronic circles for their originality and infectious energy.

Elaine Sturtevant (1924–2014) was an American artist whose practice of reproducing other artists' work constituted one of the most rigorous investigations of originality and authorship in postmodern art. Beginning in 1964, she made works after Johns, Warhol, Duchamp, and Beuys, often using their techniques, at a moment when this had no theoretical framework and was routinely dismissed. Warhol, famously, gave her his silkscreens. Her work is now understood as anticipating the frameworks of appropriation and simulacra, demonstrating that meaning lies in repetition as much as in the object — a contribution recognised with the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 2011 Venice Biennale.

JODI is the collaborative net art practice of Joan Heemskerk (b. 1968) and Dirk Paesmans (b. 1965), active since 1994. Working with websites, software, video games, and computer systems, they expose hidden structures and visual noise latent in digital technology, making visible protocols that ordinarily function as transparent infrastructure. Their early websites — apparently broken interfaces, cascading characters, visual chaos — were foundational net art, showing how the browser could be a medium for formal experimentation. Their later works extended this into modified video games, including the Wolfenstein 3D-based SOD (1999), and into installations surveyed in a Whitney retrospective.

Born in Leeds on 27 February 1955, he began his career at Hipgnosis, the design studio responsible for many Pink Floyd album covers, before co-founding Throbbing Gristle in the mid-1970s and helping define what became known as industrial music. He subsequently co-founded Psychic TV and then Coil, the duo he sustained with John Balance across two decades of recordings weaving drone, electronics, and occult imagery. He directed the Nine Inch Nails film Broken (1993). After Balance's death in 2005 he moved to Bangkok, founding the solo project Threshold HouseBoys Choir. He died in his sleep on 25 November 2010.

Young Boy Dancing Group is an international performance collective, formed in Paris in 2014, whose work explores identity, queerness, and collective action through irreverent, often extravagant live performances and videos. Led by Manuel Scheiwiller with close collaborators Maria Metsalu and Nicolas Roses, the group creates spectacles combining choreography, costume, pop cultural references, and political critique, operating between performance art and entertainment. Their structured improvisations draw on post-apocalyptic imagery, acrobatics, and DIY aesthetics to challenge heteronormative norms through camp and excess, with work presented at venues and biennials across Europe.

Raymond Dijkstra is a Dutch sound artist, musician and label-maker who runs Kasan Records, an extraordinary small label that issues each release as a unique handmade object — typically with hand-painted or hand-printed covers, individually numbered editions and elaborate sculptural packaging made from found and raw materials.

His own recordings under his name and various aliases use voice, acoustic instruments, tape manipulation and environmental sound to produce dense, ritualistic compositions with a strongly material and visual dimension — the physical qualities of his recordings inseparable from the sonic content they carry.

Working under the name Asllan, the Korean producer Soolee releases music shaped by what he describes as primitive emotions and ancient heritage. Based between South Korea and Jeju Island, he has developed an atmospheric and rhythmically intense body of work on the Seoul-based label Oslated, including the EPs Liberty & Death (2020), Sad Legend (2021), and Citizen of the World (2022), as well as the full-length The Great Flood. His music sits at the intersection of deep techno and experimental electronic production, combining dense layering with an emphasis on feeling and physical impact over formal structure.

Born in Windsor, Ontario, he is an artist, researcher, and engineer whose practice examines what technologies reveal about individuals and societies. He has worked as an electronics engineer, a polymer chemist, and an exhibit maker at the American Museum of Natural History, and has taught at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program and the Royal College of Art. His PhD, completed summa cum laude in 2015, developed a materialist philosophy of technical infrastructures supervised by Siegfried Zielinski and Avital Ronell. He currently holds a Canada Research Chair in Infrastructure, Media and Communications at NSCAD University in Halifax.

Formed in Sydney in 1978, SPK arose from a meeting between New Zealand-born Graeme Revell and Neil Hill, both employed at Callan Park psychiatric hospital, whose shared interest in the German radical Marxist collective Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv gave the group its name and conceptual starting point. Their debut album Information Overload Unit (1981) and its follow-up Leichenschrei (1982) combined metal percussion, tape manipulation, and confrontational noise to produce some of the most extreme industrial music of the era. Later lineups moved toward electronic dance and world music before Revell dissolved the group in 1988 to pursue film composition.

Ursula Block founded gelbe MUSIK in 1981, a record store in Berlin that occupied a unique position between the worlds of avant-garde music and contemporary art for three decades. It sold artists' records and experimental music but also functioned as a gallery space for scores, sound sculpture, and other intersections of visual art and music, becoming a central institution in Berlin's cultural life.

Block organized several major exhibitions of artists' records outside Gelbe MUSIK, including Extended Play (1988), co-curated with Christian Marclay, and Broken Music, named after an album by Fluxus artist Milan Knížák.

Sensorband was an international new media and performance trio comprising Edwin van der Heide (Netherlands), Zbigniew Karkowski (Poland/Japan), and Atau Tanaka (Japan/UK/France). Active from 1993 to 2003, they developed performances using body sensors, gloves, ultrasound systems, and physical interaction to control sound in real time — music produced through gesture, breath, and bodily movement translated into electronic signal. Their work was at the forefront of gestural and interface-based electronic music, performed internationally at major festivals. Karkowski's death in 2013 made any reunion impossible; their archive documents a decade of pioneering work.

Born in Pittsburgh on 29 May 1934, he studied contrabass and composition at the University of Michigan and went on to play with orchestras in Canada before settling in Cologne in 1960. There he assisted George Maciunas in organizing the first Fluxus Festival in Wiesbaden in 1962, establishing himself as a founding member of the movement. His score-based works, including Paper Piece and Variations for Double-Bass, dissolved the boundaries between concert music and performance. After two decades in arts administration he returned to making art in 1987. He died in Wiesbaden on 25 June 2016.

Doris Jones was an American vaudeville and novelty singer active in the late 1920s, known by the nickname Seal Flapper — a stage persona within the era's fashion for eccentric and comedic vocal performance. Little biographical documentation survives. Her 78rpm recordings were released on minor regional labels and circulated through touring tent shows and variety stages. Her vocal style drew on the call-and-response traditions of Black American vernacular music while incorporating the theatrical exaggeration typical of novelty blues. Jones represents the largely unchronicled world of Depression-era performers whose work surfaces only through specialist collectors and reissue archivists.

Born in Mexico City in 1981, this experimental vocalist and performance artist trained at the Escuela Superior de Música and relocated to Los Angeles in 2008, completing an MFA in VoiceArts from CalArts in 2010, where she now teaches. Her work pushes vocal sound into territories of insects, machinery, and ritual through improvisation and extended technique, informed by studies with Meredith Monk and Jaap Blonk. She co-founded the ensemble LIMINAR and has received grants from the US Artists International Award, NALAC, and New Music USA.

Gorse is a British experimental music project working in drone, noise, and electroacoustic territories. Releasing on small independent labels, Gorse constructs layered, slowly evolving sound environments that draw on the traditions of British experimental music and drone composition. Their recordings engage with sustained tones, texture, and the physical dimension of amplified sound.

A British artist who began capturing field recordings on a research trip to Iceland in 2005, he has since built a practice treating environmental sound as raw material for composition, performance, and installation. He has twice received Grants for the Arts from Arts Council England — the first supporting a residency at the Mamori Sound Project in the Brazilian Amazon in 2007, the second funding the ongoing cultural exchange programme Active Crossover. He has performed and exhibited internationally at events including the Fresh Winds Biennale in Iceland, Tsonami Festival in Chile, and Nakanojo Biennale in Japan, with releases across numerous specialist labels.

Born in 1938 in Appenzell, Switzerland, he studied at the Schule für Gestaltung in Zurich and Lucerne from 1966 to 1971 and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw from 1971 to 1972, before settling as an independent artist in St. Gallen. His practice uses water, wind, fire, and explosives as artistic material, generating time-based actions and installations governed by physical process. In 1986 he transformed the Kamor mountain above Appenzell into a volcano, burning a fuse over 35 days to ignite 200 gunpowder cones along a path to St. Gallen. In 1987 his Documenta contribution sent thousands of paper sheets through the air. In 1999 he represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale.

Los Paranos emerged from the late 1970s underground, forging a beat-driven minimal synth language marked by cold wave aesthetics. Conceived by Christophe Petchanatz — also known as Klimperei — the project circulated primarily through cassette releases during the 1980s, inhabiting the world of home recording and mail art that characterized much European minimal synth production of the period.

Klimperei, Petchanatz's more widely documented project, developed in parallel — producing recordings of a whimsical, folk-inflected character quite different from Los Paranos' colder electronics.

The Grey Organisation was a British artist collective active from 1983 to 1991, formed in Bow, East London, by Toby Mott, Daniel Saccoccio, Tim Burke, and Paul Spencer out of the punk and anarchist youth politics of the early 1980s. Rejecting the usual countercultural look, the group dressed uniformly in grey suits with shaved heads, parodying the corporate conformity of Thatcherite Britain while staging provocations, exhibitions, film, and video across more than twenty international shows. While based in New York later in the decade, they produced album art for Tommy Boy Records, most notably the cover for De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising, before disbanding in 1991.

Yellow Tears is an American noise trio formed on Long Island, New York, in 2005 by Frank Ludovico, Jeremy Nissan, and Ryan Woodhall, who bonded over a shared love of Swans, Whitehouse, and Wolf Eyes.

Their work spans death industrial, harsh noise, and sound collage, built from guitars, junk metal, electronics, and scatological vocal material. Releases include The Pissmop (2008), Don't Cry (2009, Hospital Productions), and The Cult of Yellow Tears (2010), alongside limited-run cassettes and a split with Ahlzagailzehguh.

Active for two decades, Yellow Tears are known for confrontational shows and a deliberately abject aesthetic within the harsh noise tradition.

A French experimental trio formed in 2008 by Ghédalia Tazartès, Jo Tanz, and Èlg (Laurent Gérard), bringing together Tazartès's singular vocal practice — built from invented languages, throat singing, and ritual melodic wandering — with the electronics and textural instincts of his collaborators. The group performed nearly twenty concerts and released two albums on Bo'Weavil Recordings: Les Comores (2009), a set of raw live recordings described as art brut, and Globe et Dynastie (2012). Tazartès, a singular figure in French avant-garde music since the 1970s, died in 2021.

Working under the name Ilios since 1992, Athenian artist Dimitris Kariofillis has explored the extreme ends of the sound spectrum through electronics, field recordings, and custom synthesis rigs. His practice deliberately resists genre stability, shifting between orthodox silence and full-spectrum noise across more than 400 live performances in 35 countries. In 1997 he founded the Antifrost label in Barcelona, relocating it to Athens, where it has released more than 75 albums by artists including Francisco Lopez, Sachiko M, and Zbigniew Karkowski. Key recordings include Kenrimono, drawn from pachinko parlours in Japan, and the Symphonies for oscillators and internal combustion engines.

Born in 1964 in Oslo, he is an artist, curator, musician, and producer who has been a significant presence in Norwegian and international media art since the 1990s. He is a permanent member of the theatre company Verk Produksjoner, with whom he has collaborated since 2003, and since 2016 has run Project Space Landers, an artist residency in the Mojave desert in California. He managed Videokunstarkivet, a Norwegian Arts Council-funded archive mapping video art produced in Norway since the mid-1960s. Earlier work includes the cyber-theatre piece M@ggie's Love Bytes, developed with artist Amanda Steggell.

Wilfrido Terrazas is a Mexican composer, flutist, improviser, and curator whose work spans contemporary composition, experimental music, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Recognized for expanding the sonic possibilities of the flute through extended techniques, microtonality, and exploratory performance practices, he moves fluidly between composed and improvised forms. He has collaborated with composers, visual artists, and performers across the Americas and Europe, presenting at major festivals, museums, and venues. As both solo artist and ensemble performer, he investigates sound as material and spatial phenomenon, engaging questions of listening, perception, and cultural exchange.

Schimpfluch-Gruppe is a Swiss actionist collective founded in Zurich in the late 1980s by Rudolf Eb.er (Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck) and Joke Lanz (Sudden Infant), subsequently expanded to include Dave Phillips, Marc Zeier (G*Park) and Daniel Löwenbrück. Their performances and recordings combine extreme vocalisation, physical action, contact-microphone amplification, abject humour, ritual and confrontation in a lineage that extends directly from Viennese Actionism while developing a distinctly Swiss and more absurdist character.

Aernoudt Jacobs is a Belgian sound artist and researcher based in Brussels whose work explores acoustics, vibration, and the perception of space through installation and performance. He is interested in the physics of sound and its relationship to architecture, investigating how enclosed and outdoor spaces shape and are shaped by sonic phenomena.

His installations frequently employ speaker arrays, resonating objects, and vibrating surfaces to make audible the hidden acoustic properties of architectural environments. He has presented work at institutions and festivals across Europe and beyond, including the Wiels Centre for Contemporary Art and numerous sound art festivals.

Alejandro Jodorowsky (b. 1929, Tocopilla, Chile) is a Chilean-French filmmaker, playwright, comic book writer, mime artist, and spiritual teacher whose transgressive, surrealist works have made him one of the most original and controversial figures in twentieth-century cultural life. He studied mime with Marcel Marceau in Paris and founded the Panic Movement with Fernando Arrabal and Roland Topor in 1962.

As a filmmaker, he is best known for the psychedelic westerns El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973), both of which achieved cult status through midnight movie screenings in the early 1970s.

Patrick Kosk is a Finnish composer of electroacoustic and radio art born in 1951, based in Helsinki. His work brings together environmental recording, studio composition and the specific traditions and conventions of radio art, producing pieces that have been commissioned and broadcast by major public broadcasters including Yle (Finnish Broadcasting Company), SR (Swedish Radio), DR (Danish Radio) and ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation).

His radiophonic compositions have been recognised with significant international prizes including the Prix Italia and the Prix Futura, placing him among the leading practitioners of radio art in Europe.

Austrian composer and sound artist born in 1956. He divides his practice between Berlin and Linz, working across composition, installation, and psychoacoustics. Since 1989 he has collaborated with American artist Bruce Odland as O+A, producing large-scale public installations that transform urban noise into real-time harmony. With Hannes Strobl he forms TAMTAMCLUB, and together with Strobl and media artist Dietmar Offenhuber he co-founded stadtmusik. He was a DAAD Berlin Artists Programme guest in 1997 and was named Bonn City Sound Artist in 2010.

Roberto Morales-Manzanares is a Mexican electroacoustic composer and educator. After doctoral studies at UC Berkeley, he relaunched the first bachelor program in electroacoustic music in Mexico at the Universidad de Guanajuato in the 1990s and founded El Callejón del Ruido festival in Guanajuato in 1994. His compositional practice engages real-time composition, gesture capture, and live electronics — including Wii controllers, joysticks, and Kinect — and his work is collected on compilations including Música Electroacústica Mexicana and the Anthology of Experimental Music from Mexico.

Boyd Rice (b. 1956) began recording experimental noise under the name NON in 1975, capturing and looping fragments of bubblegum pop by female vocal groups to distort melody into sustained drone. The Black Album (1978) employed tape loops and locked-groove turntable manipulations; Pagan Muzak followed in 1981 and Blood and Flame in 1987, establishing NON as a foundational force in American industrial music. Rice has recorded with Current 93, Death in June, and Rose McDowall, and the majority of his output has appeared on Mute Records.

Yuka Honda (born 1963) is a Japanese-American musician and producer, co-founder of Cibo Matto alongside Miho Hatori. Beyond Cibo Matto — whose playful, food-themed sample-based albums Viva! La Woman (1996) and Stereo Type A (1999) made them a distinctive presence in 1990s New York alternative music — Honda has pursued an extensive solo production and composition practice. She has collaborated with Sean Lennon, Nels Cline, and DJ Olive among others, and her solo work explores electronic music, improvisation, and sound art. She is a significant figure in the New York Downtown music scene.

Dan Graham (1942–2022) was an American conceptual artist whose pavilions, performance videos, and critical writings addressed the intersection of media, architecture, corporate culture, and social space. Beginning in the 1960s with text-based works submitted to art magazines, including Homes for America (1966), Graham worked across many media while maintaining a consistent conceptual focus.

His video and performance work, including Present Continuous Past(s) (1974), engaged with systems of perception and surveillance, positioning the viewer as simultaneously observer and observed.

Ákos Rózmann (1939–2005) was a Hungarian-Swedish composer who created large-scale electronic and electroacoustic works of intense spiritual and dramatic character. Born in Budapest, he studied organ and composition before emigrating to Sweden in 1971, where he settled in Stockholm and became a significant figure in Swedish electroacoustic music.

At the Electronic Music Studio in Stockholm, Rózmann developed a series of major works, most notably his twelve-hour cycle Images of Eternity — a monumental meditation on birth, death, and transcendence realized entirely through electronic sound.

Aaron Siskind (1903–1991) was an American photographer whose work moved from socially engaged documentary projects in the 1930s toward an abstract, formalist approach that aligned photography with Abstract Expressionist painting. A member of the Photo League early in his career, he later taught at Black Mountain College, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the Rhode Island School of Design.

His best-known series, including Chicago and Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation, isolate fragments of peeling walls, graffiti, and leaping bodies as flattened, gestural compositions — treating the photographic frame as a field for pure form rather than a window onto a scene.

Walter Marchetti (1931–2015) was an Italian composer associated with Zaj, the Spanish Fluxus-adjacent group he co-founded with Juan Hidalgo and Ramón Barce in Madrid in 1964. His compositions — often extremely minimal event scores and conceptual instructions — were produced over decades of activity at the margins of institutional music, with recordings released on Edition Hundertmark and Alga Marghen. His work engaged with silence, duration, and the conceptual gesture rather than sound production, and he maintained a characteristic wit and philosophical playfulness throughout his career. He is among the most important figures in Spanish experimental music.

The solo project of Clément Vercelletto, a French electronic musician based in Montreuil, who named the alias after his mother's surname and the feminine first name he might have carried. Active also in Orgue Agnès, Kaumwald, Arlt, and Tape Ensemble, he launched Sarah Terral as a vehicle for minimal, instinctive synthesis using only a compact Eurorack modular synthesizer. The debut album Le ménisque original appeared in August 2021, followed by Le Morfil in September 2023, both composed in deliberate constraint to remain direct and unelaborate.

Andrey Smirnov is a Russian interdisciplinary artist, independent curator, collector, and writer based in Thessaloniki, Greece. He is the founder of the Theremin Center in Moscow (1992), one of the world's leading centers for electronic music research and education; the Rodchenko Sound Lab at the Rodchenko Art School in Moscow (2017); and Zerkalo Art Space in Thessaloniki (2025). Since 2023, he has served as a special scientific associate at the MOMus Museum of Modern Art, Costakis Collection. He is also the author of Sound in Z (Koenig Books, 2013), a landmark study of early Soviet experiments in electronic music.

François Dufrêne (1930–1982) was a French poet and sound artist, one of the founding members of Lettrism under Isidore Isou and later a central figure of the Nouveau Réalisme movement alongside Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, and others. He developed the practice of Crirythme — vocal compositions made entirely from non-semantic vocal sounds, including whispers, cries, percussion and breath — anticipating both sound poetry and the extended vocal techniques of later decades. His recordings, released posthumously on various labels, are considered essential documents of French avant-garde sound art and the Lettrist tradition.

Formed in Mexico City in the 1980s by Ulalume, Carlos Robledo, and Walter Schmidt, this dark synthpop trio were regulars at Club 9 and embodied a mitteleuropean atmosphere transplanted to the Mexican underground. Working without drums or guitar at a time when that was provocative, they became central to the city's alternative scene. Their debut album Film appeared in December 1985 on Comrock/WEA and its music featured in the 1986 film Crónicas de familia, nominated for the Ariel Award for best original soundtrack.

Formed in Birmingham in 1981, they pioneered grindcore by fusing crust punk with extreme metal speed, producing songs so compressed that their debut album Scum (1987) contained twenty-eight tracks in under half an hour. Drummer Mick Harris is credited with coining the term grindcore. The stable lineup of vocalist Mark Greenway, bassist Shane Embury, and guitarist Mitch Harris, consolidated through the late 1980s, has remained the core of the band for most of its career across more than fifteen studio albums.

Born on 6 November 1960 in Eggenburg, Lower Austria, he studied classical guitar, cultural anthropology, and musicology in Vienna, where he now lives and works. He co-founded the jazz ensemble Ton Art in 1985 and the chamber ensemble Maxixe in 1991, and is a member of the improvisation ensemble Polwechsel. A prolific performer in electro-acoustic improvisation with over fifty recordings to his name, he teaches at Vienna's University of Music and Performing Arts. His 1997 opera Der Venusmond was partly recorded on the observation deck of the Empire State Building.

Christian Kesten is a German sound and performance artist whose work explores the boundaries of notation, instruction, and sound-producing action. Active in Berlin's experimental music and performance art scene, he develops pieces that use text, diagrams, and other notational forms to generate performances whose relationship to the score is itself an object of investigation.

His work connects to the tradition of extended notation and text scores developed by figures including Cornelius Cardew, Christian Wolff, and the Fluxus artists, while adapting these approaches to the specific concerns of contemporary sound and performance practice.

Formed in Derbyshire in 1980 by Nigel Ayers (b. 1957) alongside Caroline K (1957–2008) and Danny Ayers, Nocturnal Emissions ranks among the earliest uncompromising British industrial noise projects, contemporary with Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire. In 1979 Ayers and Caroline K co-founded Sterile Records, whose catalogue included early releases by John Balance, Maurizio Bianchi, and Lustmord. Since 1984 the project has continued as Ayers' solo vehicle, spanning musique concrète, sound collage, ambient, and post-industrial forms, combining political critique with occult imagery.

Pierre André Arcand is a Quebec-based sound poet and performer whose work occupies the tradition of French-Canadian experimental vocalisation. His practice extends sound poetry toward extreme vocal technique, breath, and the body as primary sonic instrument, engaging with both the Lettrism of François Dufrêne and the parallel traditions of Quebec avant-garde art. He has performed internationally and released recordings documenting his vocal practice. His work is part of the broader Montreal experimental arts scene and the Québécois tradition of radical performance and sound art that has produced distinctive voices since the 1970s.

Atte Elias Kantonen (born 1992, Helsinki) is a Finnish sonic artist and composer working with sound sculpture, unconventional speaker arrangements, and synthesised sound. His practice sculpts audio into forms that transmute optical qualities — shimmer, sheen, glassiness — into acoustic experience, ranging from the delicate to the organismic. He has released on OOH-sounds, SODA GONG, mappa, and SUPERPANG, and held a guest composer residency at Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm (2025), where his album Cyan Music was developed. He runs the radio show and performance series ant spa ·)((, broadcast on IDA Radio, Helsinki.

Paola Torres Núñez del Prado is a Peruvian multimedia artist working across sound, textiles, electronics, and artificial intelligence. Her practice explores the intersections of Andean textile knowledge systems — particularly the quipu, an Incan recording device of knotted cords — with computational and sonic methods. The AIELSON project used AI trained on the poetry of J.E. Eielson to generate and perform verse. She has exhibited and performed internationally and released recordings on Presses Précaires and Unexplained Sounds Group. Her work situates Indigenous epistemology and decolonial thought within contemporary artistic and technological practice.

Towering Inferno was an English experimental duo of Richard Wolfson and Andy Saunders, active from 1985 to 1999. Their sole album Kaddish (1993) was a Holocaust-reflective work of exceptional gravity, composed by Wolfson and Saunders with lyrics by Hungarian performance poet Endre Szkárosi. Released on TI Records and distributed globally by Island Records in 1995, it featured guest musicians including Chris Cutler and Tim Hodgkinson of Henry Cow, and John Marshall and Elton Dean of Soft Machine. Brian Eno described it as the most frightening record he had ever heard. The duo performed the work across Europe and Australia; Richard Wolfson died in 2005.

Fernand Vandenbogaerde (born 1939) is a Belgian composer and music educator whose work developed in the orbit of the GRM and the European electroacoustic tradition. He composed electroacoustic and mixed works in France from the 1960s and contributed to the development of music education in Belgium. His compositions engage with the transformation of acoustic sound through studio technique, and he participated in the broader European new music community that formed around the GRM and IRCAM in the second half of the twentieth century.

New Zealand sound artist, technologist, and composer who completed his doctorate at Te Kokei, the New Zealand School of Music at Victoria University of Wellington. His work brings together instrumental composition, kinetic sculpture, and music technology for performance and gallery settings. Notable works include Hummingbird, a sonic installation, and the Brackets series, which deconstructs the piano through live electronics. His output has been presented in Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Colombia, Hong Kong, and Greece.

A Japanese singer born on October 20, 1998 in Kagoshima, she built an early following as a cosplayer and independent musician before becoming a finalist in a Sacra Music audition in 2017. She made her major debut the following year as the singing voice of the character Elza Kanzaki in the anime series Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online, releasing the single Pilgrim in April 2018, which topped the iTunes Japan anime singles chart and Amazon Japan digital music rankings. Her sound combines acoustic songwriting with electronic production, and she has continued to release singles and albums under Sacra Music.

Etrusca 3D is the collaborative project of Italian sound artist Francesco Cavaliere and American musician Spencer Clark. Their name plays on Cavaliere's Etruscan heritage and Clark's immersion in three-dimensional sound work. Their methodology is rooted in invocation: they sampled Cavaliere's voice pronouncing the names of Etruscan deities, loaded the recordings into an Emax 2 3D sampler, and performed with them. Their self-titled debut album, released in 2020 on Clark's Pacific City Discs with Discrepant, features tracks named after Etruscan figures including Tuchulcha, Vanth, and Voltumna — music at once ritual and highly synthetic.

Florentine composer, pianist, and visual artist (1946–2018) who devoted his career to the recovery and performance of early twentieth-century avant-garde music. As a pianist he gave the first modern performances of numerous Italian and Russian Futurist compositions, as well as works by George Antheil, Leo Ornstein, and Alexandr Mossolov. His research culminated in the Nuova enciclopedia del futurismo musicale (2009), published by Fondazione Mudima. Combining music with visual art and synaesthetic experiment, his practice drew on a lineage stretching from Kandinsky and Scriabin through Futurism and the Bauhaus, making him a singular figure in Italian new music.

Born in Quebec City in 1959, he studied pharmacy, then architecture, graduating from Laval University's School of Architecture in 1984. His work in audio art, video, sound installation, and performance explores memory, transference, and space-time, with sound recordings spread across more than thirty releases. In 1993 he co-founded the collective Avatar in Quebec City, which became a flagship institution for sound and electronic art in the province, serving as its artistic director from 2004 to 2009. He has been a professor at Laval University's School of Art since 2008 and in 2023 received the insignia of the Ordre des arts et des lettres du Québec.

Acezantez is an experimental music group founded by Croatian composer and multi-instrumentalist Dubravko Detoni, active in Zagreb during the 1970s. The ensemble occupied a distinctive position within the Yugoslav avant-garde, pursuing an approach to sound that resisted both Western academic orthodoxy and the more accessible currents of contemporary composition.

Their self-titled album, originally released in 1977, is built from rich textural constructions involving percussive squeals, scrapes, and rattles; pitchless and parched woodwind timbres; and dislocated keyboard sounds assembled into dense, unclassifiable pieces.

Terry Riley is an American composer born in 1935 in Colfax, California. A central figure of American minimalism, his 1964 composition In C — a collection of 53 short melodic cells played in sequence by any instrumentation — became one of the most influential scores of the twentieth century. A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969) extended this approach through tape loops and keyboard improvisation. His later work integrates Indian classical music, particularly the vocal practice of Pandit Pran Nath, with whom he studied for many years. He continues to compose, perform, and collaborate internationally.

Born in Utrecht in 1986, this Dutch musician first came to prominence as Kyteman, fronting The Kyteman Orchestra whose debut The Hermit Sessions reached the Dutch top five in 2009 and sold over 75,000 copies. After the orchestra disbanded around 2012, he turned fully to modular synthesis, building an elaborate Eurorack-based system with which he performs live techno and improvised electronic music. He live-streams marathon jam sessions via Twitch and YouTube, inviting audiences to interact with and influence the patch in real time. He trained as a trumpet player at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague.

Clara Rockmore (1911–1998) was a Lithuanian-American musician widely regarded as the foremost classical theremin player of the twentieth century. Born Clara Reisenberg in Vilna, she trained as a violin prodigy before an arm injury redirected her toward the theremin, which she mastered under Léon Theremin himself. Her recordings demonstrated the instrument's capacity for lyrical, precise expression and were crucial in establishing it as a legitimate concert instrument. Her friendship and collaboration with Theremin himself was well documented. Her recordings, reissued on Delos, remain the definitive theremin performances.

Mexican-Dutch composer Juan Felipe Waller (b. 1971) grew up in Mexico City before studying composition at the Rotterdam Conservatorium with Klaas de Vries and electroacoustic music with René Uylenhoet, graduating with distinction in 1999. He went on to study electronics and computer-aided composition at IRCAM in Paris. His works explore a deformational discourse between harmony and texture, often using non-standard materials such as ceramic tiles, plastics, and recyclable objects to generate electronic-like timbres by acoustic means. He has been commissioned by Ensemble SuperMusique in Montreal and by Cantaloupe Music, and has performed in Mexico, Europe, and North America.

studio LABOUR is the Berlin platform of the duo LABOUR, composer and SuperCollider performer Farahnaz Hatam and composer-drummer Colin Hacklander, who have worked together since 2013 and founded LABOUR in 2018. The studio extends their practice into editions, releases, and curatorial projects.

Their work moves between digital sound synthesis, algorithmic composition, percussion, and voice, foregrounding active listening within architectural spaces. Releases include the album nine-sum sorcery (2020), featuring Hani Mojtahedy, and the compilation GmbH: An Anthology of Music for Fashion Shows. They have presented work at venues including Callie's, Berlin, and Shedhalle, Zurich.

Formed by Gary Mundy in 1982 alongside the launch of the Broken Flag label, this British group became a defining force in the UK power electronics and industrial music scene. Mundy and Anthony di Franco — also known from Skullflower and his solo projects Ethnic Acid and JFK — shaped the group across two parallel modes: a power trio incorporating bass and drums, and a stripped-down electronics-only duo. Moving between white-noise extremity and improvisational noise rock, they built a body of work that influenced generations of artists across experimental and heavy music.

Atom Heart is one of many aliases of Uwe Schmidt, a German-born artist who has lived in Santiago de Chile since 1993. Under Atom Heart he produced minimal techno and ambient electronic music in the 1990s, releasing on Rather and Mille Plateaux. Schmidt operates across dozens of aliases — including Señor Coconut, Lassigue Bendthaus, and Lisa Carbon — each articulating different genre conventions with an ironic and satirical intent. The Señor Coconut project, rearranging Kraftwerk and other music in Latin American styles, made him a distinctive figure in discussions of electronic music, postcolonialism, and cultural translation.

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) was an American artist who became the defining figure of Pop Art and one of the most influential and widely discussed artists of the twentieth century. Born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh to Slovak immigrant parents, he worked as a commercial illustrator in New York before establishing himself as a fine artist in the early 1960s with his Campbell's soup cans and Marilyn Monroe silkscreens.

His studio, the Factory, became a center of New York cultural life — attracting musicians, writers, drag queens, socialites, and other figures — and his systematic use of industrial print processes challenged the notion of unique, hand-crafted artistic objects.

Mexico City-based artist and musician Malitzin Cortes, who works under the alias CNDSD, trained in architecture at UNAM before developing a multidisciplinary practice spanning live coding, generative synthesis, 3D animation, expanded cinema, and sound design. Her live coding sets use TidalCycles to generate emotionally complex, post-cinematic electronic music. She has performed at MUTEK, Sónar Istanbul, ZKM, and Ars Electronica, and teaches and researches at CENTRO University and UNAM. Her album In Tongues draws on live-coded performances to produce raw and textured electronic tracks.

edIT (Edward Ma, born 1980) is a Los Angeles-based electronic producer and member of The Glitch Mob. Working in glitch-hop and experimental hip-hop production, he developed a dense, highly processed sound characterised by intricate drum programming and elaborate sample manipulation. His solo album Crying Over Pros for No Reason (2007) and his work within The Glitch Mob — a trio also comprising Ooah and Boreta — brought his approach to large festival audiences. The Glitch Mob's debut Drink the Sea (2010) was a commercial and critical success that helped define a strain of cinematic, maximalist glitch-influenced electronic music.

Italian writer and scholar based in London since 2009, her practice explores the intersections of literature, voice, and sonic culture through what she calls chimeric writing—composite, many-voiced, unstable in form. Between 1999 and 2008 she was a contributing editor at the Italian music magazine Blow Up, writing on experimental music and sound art. She taught in the MA Sound Arts at UAL London College of Communication from 2014 to 2023, and previously at the University of Bergen. Her books include Singed, Nothing As We Need It (2022), and Chimeras (2022), with Beauty, Burning (2026) forthcoming from Erratum Press.

AG Davis, born in 1984 in Lubbock, Texas and now based in Jacksonville, Florida, is a sound poet, writer, performance artist and composer. His intense, often durational works merge harsh noise, voice and symbolic gestures to confront themes of corporeality, power and transcendence. Through ritualistic actions and sonic expression he creates powerful experiences that challenge the boundaries between performer and audience, blending literary, visual and auditory elements into uncompromising, visceral statements. He has released on Gilgongo, Imminent Frequencies and other underground imprints.

Formed in Sheffield in 1973 by Richard H. Kirk, Stephen Mallinder, and Chris Watson, this industrial and electronic group took their name from the Zurich Dada cabaret. Their early work fused tape loops, found noise, and DIY electronics before absorbing post-punk, funk, and acid house into a body of seventeen studio albums. Key records include Red Mecca (1981) and The Crackdown (1983). Watson departed in 1981; Kirk continued as a duo with Mallinder until 1994, then revived the name solo until his death in 2021.

Henry Jacobs (1924–2009) was an American sound artist, radio producer, and humourist based in San Francisco. Working at KPFA radio from the 1950s, he pioneered a form of comedic tape collage and musique concrète. His recordings for Vanguard Records combined wit with formal innovation. He collaborated with sculptor Wally Hedrick on the Vortex Concerts at the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco — early examples of immersive audio-visual performance that influenced psychedelic culture. His work anticipates later developments in sampling, audio collage, and the aesthetics of found sound.

kid606 (Miguel Depedro, born 1979) is a Venezuelan-American electronic musician and producer based in Los Angeles. A central figure in breakcore and laptop noise in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he released prolifically on Tigerbeat6, Sublight, and Mille Plateaux — combining distorted hip-hop samples, hardcore breakbeats, and irreverent energy into work that was simultaneously technically extreme and absurdist. The Action Packed Mentalist Brings You the Fucking Jams (1999) and Who Still Kill Sound? (2000) are landmarks of the American breakcore scene. He has continued releasing under various aliases.

Ngoma ra Mrongo refers to a specific form of traditional ceremonial music from coastal East Africa, associated with the Swahili-speaking communities of Tanzania. Ngoma — meaning both drum and the cultural practice surrounding it — encompasses music, song, dance, and healing in a single inseparable complex. Mrongo refers to a specific ceremony or drum type within this tradition. Recordings of such ceremonies have been gathered by ethnomusicologists and released on Ocora and Museum Collection Berlin, preserving music integral to the spiritual and social life of East African coastal communities.

Based in Brooklyn, New York, he is a composer and sound artist whose practice centers on the perceptual and spatial possibilities of sound. Since the 1980s he has created multichannel generative works called Room Pieces, realized through speaker systems designed for specific architectural contexts and presented in galleries, museums, and concert halls. In 1996 he founded Diapason Sound Art, a New York space dedicated to sound-based and intermedia practice that ran until 2011. He is music director of the Liz Gerring Dance Company and teaches composition at NYU Steinhardt.

Gruppo di Nun is a collective of psycho-activists dedicated to organizing forms of occult resistance against hetero-patriarchal dogma. Their work advances an alternative ceremonial practice grounded in non-dual Love—one that embraces entropy, dissolution, and the cosmic unmaking of fixed order.
In this framework, darkness is not opposed to love but revealed as its most radical form. By making peace with the shadow and nourishing the Great Beast, Gruppo di Nun invokes a cosmology in which seals are broken, binaries collapse, and Cosmic Love is finally released from the constraints of order, purity, and fear.

John McLaughlin (born 1942) is a British jazz guitarist from Yorkshire who became one of the most technically accomplished and stylistically influential figures in jazz fusion. After sessions with Miles Davis on In a Silent Way (1969) and Bitches Brew (1970), he founded the Mahavishnu Orchestra in 1971 — a quintet of extraordinary technical ferocity whose albums The Inner Mounting Flame (1971) and Birds of Fire (1973) are landmark records of jazz-rock fusion. He later formed Shakti, exploring Indian classical music with acoustic guitar, and has continued to perform and record in jazz, fusion, and Indian-influenced contexts across more than six decades.

Hotel Morphila Orchester is a German experimental and dark cabaret collective whose work draws on Weimar Republic aesthetics, industrial music, and European cabaret traditions. Their performances combine theatrical presentation with electronic and acoustic instrumentation in ways that evoke pre-war decadence filtered through post-war anxiety. Active in German underground circuits since the late 1980s, they have released recordings that document a distinctive approach to dark cabaret that sets them apart from the more purely musical orientations of related German experimental scenes.

Jules Reidy is an Australian guitarist and composer based in Berlin whose work spans experimental composition, electroacoustic music, and song. Working with a custom-built 12-string guitar designed for just intonation and alternate tunings, they create music inhabiting the space between microtonal mysticism, minimalism, and transcendental folk. Albums including World in World (Black Truffle, 2022) and Trances (Shelter Press, 2023) demonstrate their ability to integrate complex compositional thinking with direct emotional communication. Reidy has collaborated with Oren Ambarchi, claire rousay, and Andrea Belfi, and received commissions from the JACK Quartet.

Cranioclast is an electronic and industrial music project from Geneva, active since the mid-1980s. Working in harsh noise, industrial ambience, and rhythmic electronics, they have released extensively on Prikosnovenie, Permis de Construire, and other European underground labels. Their sound combines dense electronic texture with a formal rigour that sets them apart from pure noise — compositional structures emerge from the brutal sonic surface. They remain one of the more enduring Swiss experimental electronic acts, maintaining a consistent practice across nearly four decades of underground activity.

Frank Vincent Zappa (21 December 1940 – 4 December 1993) was an American composer, guitarist, satirist, and bandleader born in Baltimore, Maryland, whose output of more than sixty albums defied genre throughout a thirty-year career. His 1966 debut with the Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!, was a key influence on the development of the concept album, and his later work ranged from orchestral composition to Synclavier-based electronic music. He testified before the US Senate in 1985 in opposition to music censorship legislation, and his Grammy-winning album Jazz from Hell (1986) was realised almost entirely on the Synclavier. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995.

Born in Guadalajara in 1980, he is a cellist, composer, and multidisciplinary sound artist who has developed a practice oscillating between experimental music, installation, and pedagogy. He studied cello at the Instituto Cultural Cabañas, later trained in Sonology at the Koninklijk Conservatorium in The Hague, and completed a master's degree with Alvin Lucier at Wesleyan University. A doctoral graduate of the University of North Texas, he is the founder of Punto Ciego Festival, a platform for sound art and experimental practice based in Mexico.

Rona Geffen is an Israeli-German multidisciplinary artist and electronic musician who describes her work as Hardcore Pop-Avantgarde. She has released four solo albums and co-composed, produced, directed, and performed the feminist anti-war electronic opera STRIKE!, based on Aristophanes' Lysistrata. Her practice spans composition for dance and theatre, spatial sound research, and live performance across Europe and the US, with collaborators including Mad Professor and choreographer Yasmeen Godder. Since 2015 she has developed Geometric Sound, a spatial sound research practice focused on healing and well-being.

Joschua Yesni Arnaut is a Frankfurt-based visual artist born in 1989, working with sculpture, installation, and material-based practice. He studied Experimental Spatial Concepts and sculpture at Offenbach University of Art and Design under Heiner Blum and Mike Bouchet, completing his diploma in 2023. His practice is strongly autobiographical, engaging with spatial and material investigation. A recipient of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes scholarship and the Frankfurt Artists' Aid prize (2021), his work has been shown in art contexts in Germany and internationally.

Faust are a German experimental rock group formed in Wümme in 1971. With access to a converted schoolhouse studio and Polydor backing, they produced Faust (1971) and So Far (1972), placing them alongside Can and Amon Düül II as founders of Krautrock. Their approach was radical: collage, concrete music, free improvisation, and rock combined in ways that had no precedent. The Faust Tapes (1973) became an unlikely best-seller. They dissolved in 1975, reformed in 1990 with rotating membership, and have continued recording with sustained invention, most recently on Bureau B.

Keiichiro Shibuya (b. 1973) is a Japanese musician, composer, and media artist known for projects that span electronic music, AI, and performance. His work with Android Opera — operas performed by humanoid androids — has been widely discussed as an investigation of the boundaries between human and machine performance. His electronic music projects, including work with ATAK label, demonstrate technical sophistication and aesthetic ambition. He is one of the most prominent figures in Japanese experimental electronic music and has presented internationally at major technology and music events.

female:pressure is an international network of female, transgender, and non-binary artists in the fields of electronic music and digital arts, founded by Electric Indigo (Susanne Kirchmayr) in Vienna in 1998. The network functions as a worldwide resource of talent that can be searched by location, profession, style, or name, and was established as an information resource and communications platform for improving the representation and visibility of its members.

The platform is notable for raising the profile of women and gender minorities in electronic music, both through its directory and through festivals and media campaigns.

Skream (Oliver Dene Jones, born 1986) is a British DJ and producer from Croydon, south London, one of the central figures of the dubstep genre. Beginning to produce at age fourteen, his half-speed, sub-bass-heavy productions on Tempa Records — particularly Skream! (2006) — helped define the sound of the Rinse FM and DMZ club era of dubstep. His track Midnight Request Line became one of the defining records of the genre. He later transitioned toward house and disco-influenced production and DJ-ing as dubstep's underground phase passed into mainstream pop, but his early releases remain essential documents of South London bass culture.

Cory Arcangel (born 1978, Buffalo, New York) is an American artist working at the intersection of technology, popular culture, and music. Trained at Oberlin Conservatory, his practice spans software art, video, installation, and performance, often using obsolete consumer technologies and video game hardware as raw material. His Super Mario Clouds (2002) — a hacked NES cartridge stripped to its drifting cloud layer — became a defining work of post-internet art. He has exhibited at the Whitney Museum, MoMA, and Barbican, and has released music and visual work through his own studio in Brooklyn, exploring the aesthetics of boredom, automation, and digital vernacular.

Smut is an experimental noise and electronic music project whose name follows the blunt, provocative naming conventions common to the underground noise and tape scene. Like many such projects, it operates outside the conventional music industry, releasing material in small batches via Bandcamp and cassette-focused DIY labels.

Its work draws on noise, harsh electronics and abstract sound collage, favouring raw, unpolished production over studio refinement. As with much of this underground circuit, Smut's releases circulate through word of mouth, online tape directories and trades among collectors of experimental and noise music, rather than mainstream distribution or press coverage.

Tetsu Inoue (born 1958) is a Japanese electronic musician based in New York. Releasing on FAX+49-69/450464 and Sub Rosa from the early 1990s, he developed a deeply immersive ambient and drone practice that expanded the template established by ambient music toward greater density and complexity. His Ambiant Otaku (1994) and subsequent releases built layered, slow-moving electronic environments with an attention to timbral richness that distinguished him from minimalist ambient. He has collaborated with Atom Heart (Uwe Schmidt) and released prolifically across experimental and ambient circuits. His work anticipates much of what became known as ambient techno and IDM.

Born in 1972, this Berlin-based curator, producer, and designer works at the intersection of artistic production and sound art. He co-founded the media art festival garage between 1997 and 2005, co-founded the Berlin platform DOCK in 2008, and initiated Tuned City, a platform exploring sound and architecture. As a member of staalplaat soundsystem between 2001 and 2010 he realized installations and performances worldwide. He is also co-founder of the design agency milchhof:atelier and teaches in the fields of art and design.

Ibimeni refers to music of the Garifuna people — an Afro-Indigenous community descended from the union of West and Central African peoples and the Island Caribs of the Lesser Antilles, now living primarily in Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and diaspora communities in the United States. The Garifuna musical tradition — including the punta, paranda, and hungu-hungu — integrates African drumming, chant, and dance with Amerindian vocal styles. Ibimeni recordings document this living tradition; Garifuna musical culture was inscribed on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2001.

A Japanese industrial duo formed by Asfj, who handles voice, composition, and sampler, and Kai, who plays metal percussion. Their live performances are built around scattering tons of scrap steel and tools, recreating the inorganic sounds of factories and automobiles in a practice that recalls early industrial music. The group has built a following across genres and generations both in Japan and internationally. Their 2023 release Sample, issued on VLZ Produkt, presents their distinctive blend of junk noise, sampler manipulation, and confrontational performance energy.

A British DJ active for over two decades, she first came to prominence with the roving rave party Peg, a series of multi-location events she ran for ten years until 2009. She is a resident at Freerotation, the intimate non-profit Welsh festival, and hosts a regular slot on Rinse FM. Her sets are famously difficult to categorise, moving fluidly between early UK acid, deep house, psychedelic techno, Goa trance, and ambient textures. She co-runs the London party Night Moves and produces under the name Invisible Menders, releasing on Porn Wax and Animals on Psychedelics.

Nick Cave (b. 1957, Warracknabeal, Victoria, Australia) is an Australian musician, novelist, actor, and screenwriter whose work with The Birthday Party and The Bad Seeds has made him one of the most significant and distinctive figures in post-punk, alternative rock, and contemporary song. His musical range — from the ferocious chaos of The Birthday Party to the hushed intimacy of his more recent Bad Seeds albums — reflects a sustained engagement with darkness, violence, love, and faith.

The Birthday Party, formed in Melbourne in the late 1970s and active until 1983, combined the abrasion of punk with gothic imagery and a ferocious energy that influenced countless subsequent artists.

Rechenzentrum (German for Data Centre) is a Berlin-based project founded in 1997 by DJ Marc Weiser and Irish video artist Lillevän Pobjoy, with Christian Conrad contributing as a studio member on early recordings. From the outset they defined their work as a band in which audio and video are equally weighted — treating video as an instrument and music as something to be experienced visually. They debuted at Documenta 1997 in Kassel and released their self-titled album on Kitty-Yo in 2000, followed by Director's Cut in 2003. Their sound is minimalist and polyrhythmic, deeply hypnotic while remaining inventive and sculptural.

Church Universal & Triumphant is a New Age religious movement founded by Mark L. Prophet in 1958 and later led by Elizabeth Clare Prophet. Based in the Summit Lighthouse, the organisation produced extensive audio recordings of teachings, rituals, and invocations — including chanted decrees — that formed part of their spiritual practice. These recorded ceremonies have an unusual sonic character, combining quasi-liturgical chant with New Age spiritual content. The organisation established a large community in Montana in the 1980s and was known for apocalyptic prophecies and bunker construction. Their recordings circulate as cult documents.

Australian sound artist Felicity Mangan has been based in Berlin since 2008, where she builds minimal quasi-bioacoustic compositions from field recordings of frogs, insects, and other vocal animals drawn partly from a personal archive of native Australian wildlife. Her releases include Stereo'frog'ic on Longform Editions and Creepy Crawly on Mappa Editions. She frequently performs through hand-made speakers and found objects, mimicking biophonic patterns to produce immersive sound environments. More recent output includes Wet on Wet on Klangklamm/Warm Winters Ltd. and the single Körner Park on Care of Editions.

Halim El-Dabh (1921–2017) was an Egyptian-American composer, ethnomusicologist, and educator whose career spanned six decades. In 1944, while a student in Cairo, he used a wire recorder to manipulate a recording of a Zaar exorcism ceremony, creating The Expression of Zaar — one of the earliest known works of tape music, predating Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète experiments by four years.

From the late 1950s he worked at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center alongside Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening, later teaching for decades at Kent State University. He is now recognised as foundational to the early history of electronic music.

Trained first as a musician — studying at the Manhattan School of Music and under Nadia Boulanger in Paris — Elaine Bearer subsequently pursued an MD–PhD at UCSF and became a neuropathologist and brain scientist. Since 2009 she has held the Harvey Family Endowed Professorship in Pathology at the University of New Mexico, while maintaining a parallel practice as a composer with over a hundred works. She was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2011. Her dual career bridges musical analysis, particularly of Haydn's string quartets, and neuroscientific research into the structure and function of the brain.

Bryan Lewis Saunders is an American artist and performer known primarily for his ongoing project of self-portraiture — hundreds of self-portraits drawn or painted while under the influence of different drugs, creating a systematic phenomenological record. His performances involve extreme vocal and physical endurance. He has released recordings documenting these performances and has exhibited his visual work internationally. His practice sits at the intersection of conceptual art, body art, and outsider aesthetics, approaching self-documentation as both scientific experiment and performance event.

Born in Ferntree Gully, Victoria, Australia in 1972, Mark Harwood ran the experimental record shop Synaesthesia in Melbourne before relocating to London, where he founded Penultimate Press — a small-run imprint releasing music and books by artists including Graham Lambkin, Étant Donnés, and Matthew P Hopkins. Under the alias Astor he makes recordings that draw on field recording, musique concrète, and electronics, developing works that resist genre cliché. His 2022 album Offering was recorded in Berlin and mixed in London by Graham Lambkin. He is active across music distribution, performance, and publishing.

CoH is the alias of Russian-born, Berlin-based musician Ivan Pavlov. Working from the 1990s onward with analogue and digital synthesis, he developed a practice of precise, highly formulated electronic composition that draws on Russian mathematical traditions, techno, and noise. Releases on Raster-Noton and Editions Mego include Strings (2006), PLAY (2007), and a series of collaborations including COH + Cosey Fanni Tutti (2009). His approach to structure and tonal precision distinguishes him within the Berlin experimental scene. He also records under other aliases and has collaborated with Mika Vainio, Cosey Fanni Tutti, and others.

Born in Bolzano in 1974, Hoelzl studied audio engineering in Graz and music technology at the HKU in Utrecht, followed by a fellowship in Sound Arts at the Academy for Media Arts Cologne. His practice — most often realised as sound installations — is shaped by a sustained interest in language and the processes of translation between different symbolic systems, developed using the open-source programming language SuperCollider. Installations have been shown at the Venice Biennale for Architecture, Manifesta 7, and Transmediale. He has taught at IMM Düsseldorf and HfK Bremen and is currently assistant professor for Computational and Generative Arts at UdK Berlin.

Born in London in 1968 to an Austrian father, he relocated to Vienna and became one of the defining figures of European experimental electronics. Recording as Pita, his 1996 debut album Seven Tons for Free on the Mego label—later awarded a Prix Ars Electronica—helped establish the glitch and laptop music movements of the following decade. He founded Editions Mego in 2006 as successor to Mego, building a catalogue that included Oneohtrix Point Never, Caterina Barbieri, and Mark Fell. He died of a heart attack in Berlin in July 2021, aged 53.

Australian double bass player based in Berlin whose practice spans free improvisation, experimental composition, and grassroots organisation. He founded the Splinter Orchestra and the NOW now Festival in Sydney, events that helped shape Australia's improvised music community. In Berlin he has become a fixture of the Echtzeitmusik scene, performing at Ausland and collaborating with improvising musicians across Europe and beyond. His approach draws on William Parker and Barre Phillips, moving freely between high-energy and radically reduced dynamics. His album Bass Strait was recorded at Ausland, Berlin.

Bastro was an American post-hardcore and noise rock band from Chicago, formed in 1987 by David Grubbs, John McEntire, and Bundy K. Brown — the core of what would become Gastr del Sol and later contributing members to Tortoise. Their aggressive, jagged guitar work and complex rhythms placed them between noise rock and post-hardcore, releasing on Homestead Records and Touch and Go. Albums Diablo Guapo (1990) and Sing the Troubled Beast (1990) are important documents of the Chicago underground before the post-rock movement crystallised around their successors. Grubbs's later solo work and Gastr del Sol continued their experimental ambitions.

Metahaven is a research and design studio founded by Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden based in Amsterdam. Metahaven’s work – both commissioned and self-directed – reflects political and social issues in collaboratively produced graphic design objects and media. In addition to international presentation of design and research projects, Metahaven has written and edited numerous publications such as ‘Uncorporate Identity’, a design anthology for our dystopian age, ‘Can Jokes Bring Down Governments’, and a forthcoming book ‘Black Transparency’. The studio was awarded the CoBRA Art Prize 2013.

A musician, scholar, and curator based in Mexico City, she works at the intersection of avant-garde sound art, electronic music, and transmedial practice, with a focus on Mexico and Latin America. She studied piano before completing an MA in musicology at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where her thesis examined Helmut Lachenmann's string quartet Gran Torso. She is currently a PhD candidate in musicology at UNAM, pursuing a cultural study of contemporary electronic and audio cultures through the life trajectories of Mexican electronic artists, drawing on ethnography, autoethnography, and oral history. She is also a member of the Mexico City sound art collective Ruido 13.

Monobox is an electronic music project releasing in the dub techno and deep electronic idiom. Working with synthesisers, drum machines, and dub-influenced processing, Monobox produces spacious, bass-heavy recordings in the tradition of early 1990s German and UK electronic music. Their releases occupy the genre territory between Basic Channel-influenced minimal techno and more experimental electronic music.

Drumcorps is the musical project of Aaron Spectre, born and raised in rural Massachusetts. He moved to Berlin in 2003 to pursue music full time. Drumcorps fuses breakcore, metal, and hardcore with a rigorous approach to rhythm programming. His debut album Grist on Ad Noiseam received an Award of Distinction in Digital Musics at the Prix Ars Electronica in Linz. He has since released on labels including Planet Mu and Cock Rock Disco, touring across Europe, North America, and Japan. A 2015 collaboration with Igor Cavalera of Sepultura produced the album Falling Forward. Spectre also performs deeper club-oriented sets under the alias Aaron Spectre.

Zander Raymond is a Chicago-based multi-disciplinary musician and artist working across composition, improvisation, and live sampling. His practice draws on jazz, avant-garde, and electronic music traditions, employing an improvisational approach with imaginative filtering and real-time processing. He has released approximately a dozen albums over the past decade, including Secrets from a Squirrel (Florabelle), To Have Several Lives, and no one notices the fly (2025), on which French Door appears. He has collaborated with Lia Kohl on In Transit (Un Je Ne Sais Quoi). His work is part of an active experimental music community in Chicago.

Born on 30 May 1953 in Kitchener, Ontario, this Canadian composer, saxophonist, and media artist coined the term "plunderphonics" in a 1985 paper presented at the Wired Society Electro-Acoustic Conference in Toronto. His 1988 Plunderphonics EP, distributed free to radio stations, was ordered destroyed by the Canadian Recording Industry Association after pressure from Michael Jackson's label. From 1993 to 1996 he produced Grayfolded, a double-disc work assembled from over a hundred live recordings of the Grateful Dead's "Dark Star," commissioned by the band.

Zoe Zag is a Los Angeles-based artist who grew up around Venice Beach, working across painting, photography, prints, set design, and zines under a punk-derived visual language. Her archive, Cry Tuff, gathers these projects into an ongoing record.

Her work has crossed into music and fashion: she designed cover art for FIDLAR's album TOO and contributed to the art direction surrounding Sia's "Chandelier" video, alongside collaborations with clothing designers and musicians in the Los Angeles scene.

Zag has described punk less as a musical style than as an attitude of saying and feeling exactly what one wants, an ethos reflected in the raw, collage-like character of her visual output.

Pauline Anna Strom (1946–2020) was an American electronic musician who recorded a series of ambient synthesiser albums in the early 1980s under her own Trans-Siberian Pipeline imprint before withdrawing from active musical life for over thirty years, returning to recording and performance in the 2010s following rediscovery of her work by archivists and experimental music enthusiasts. Visually impaired from birth, she developed a tactile and spatially immersive approach to synthesiser composition, building environments of considerable emotional and formal depth from the limited technologies available to an independent artist in the early 1980s. Albums including Trans-Siberian Express (1982)

German artist and researcher with a degree in audio and video engineering from the Institute for Music and Media Düsseldorf and a Meisterschüler degree in Arts and Media from the Berlin University of the Arts. His work spans improvised electronic music, multichannel sound installations, kinetic and cybernetic sound objects, and live-coding. He currently works as a researcher at UdK Berlin on the design, development, and dissemination of new musical instruments, and teaches Digital Media at the University of the Arts Bremen. His practice maintains a close relationship between instrument building, experimental electronics, and performance.

Venzha Christ is an Indonesian artist, researcher, and institution builder who has founded and directs a remarkable series of organizations connecting art, science, and space exploration. He is the founder of HONF Foundation, v.u.f.o.c lab, the Indonesia Space Science Society (ISSS), the International SETI Conference, and VMARS (v.u.f.o.c Mars Analogue Research Station).

In collaboration with artists, scientists, astronomers, astrophysicists, and engineers in Indonesia, he has established the ISSS as a framework for exploring space from an interdisciplinary and culturally distinctive perspective.

Milan Knížák is a Czech artist born in 1940 in Pilsen. A central figure in Czech Fluxus and the Aktual group he founded in Prague in the early 1960s, Knížák organised happenings, actions and street events that drew the hostile attention of the communist authorities — he was arrested and subjected to political persecution on multiple occasions throughout the decade.

From 1963 he began deliberately damaging vinyl records — burning them, painting them, cutting them, gluing fragments of different records together — and playing the results on conventional turntables.

Psychic TV is a British multimedia project formed in 1981 by Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson following the dissolution of Throbbing Gristle. Functioning as the musical and ritual arm of the Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, the group explored noise, industrial music, acid house, and hypnagogic pop across an enormous catalogue. Their work on Force the Hand of Chance (1982) and the Dreams Less Sweet (1983) sessions was formally adventurous; later releases pursued acid house under the guise of Psychic TV and Brian Jones Town Massacre. P-Orridge died in 2020.

A multi-instrumentalist and one-man band from Michoacán, Mexico, he performs as a solo ensemble combining harp, keyboards, and voice — an idiosyncratic setup that has made him a notable presence on the internet, where videos of his performances have circulated widely. He offers his services for weddings and public and private events, blending popular and Christian repertoire with karaoke elements into a highly personal form of regional folk entertainment rooted in the musical traditions of Michoacán, a state with a deep connection to the arpa grande — the large-format Mexican harp that has been a fixture of its rural and agricultural communities for generations.

Agencement is the long-running project of Japanese musician Hideaki Shimada, born in 1962 in Kanazawa. Since the 1980s he has produced intricate, delicate violin-based experimental music that fuses improvisation, tape techniques, minimalism and subtle textural layering into highly personal sonic worlds. Starting with solo violin improvisations in the early 1980s, he added electronics and tape manipulation to create a distinctive language that occupies a unique position between composition and improvisation. His releases have appeared on Rallenti, Doubtful Sounds, and other specialized labels.

Khampagar Monastery is a Tibetan Buddhist monastery founded in Tashi Jong, Himachal Pradesh, India, by Khamtrul Rinpoche following the Tibetan diaspora after 1959. The monastery's ritual orchestra performs ceremonial music — long trumpets, oboe, drums, cymbals, and chanting — integral to Buddhist ritual and meditation practice. Recordings of these ceremonies document a tradition preserved in exile and represent a significant corpus of Himalayan Buddhist ritual music. Sublime Frequencies and other ethnographic labels have documented related Tibetan monastic music traditions.

Founder of Montreal's ORAL_records, he has directed the label since 1994 with a sustained focus on sound exploration and experimental composition. He is also a founding member of Le Bloc ORAL, a collective of artists, musicians, and curators working across sound, kinetic art, and media distribution. As a curator his engagements have included MUTEK from 2000 to 2006 and the Media Lounge of the FCMM since 1998, as well as experimental music events produced in Quebec and internationally since 2001. ORAL_records has released and commissioned works by Éliane Radigue, Toshimaru Nakamura, Aki Onda, and Akio Suzuki, among others.

Born in 1953 in Wichita, Kansas, he grew up in Los Angeles before relocating to Tokyo in 1982 and eventually settling in Bologna, Italy. His practice spans performance, installation, pirate radio, and recorded sound, and has consistently pushed into confrontational territory since the 1970s. His 1984 LP Riot remains a landmark of extreme music and musique concrète. In Tokyo he ran illegal rooftop pirate broadcasts and collaborated with Keiji Haino and Masami Akita. His work has been released on Touch, Sub Rosa, and Ash International, among others.

Abbas Zahedi is a British-Iranian artist working across sonic and sculptural forms, with a practice that engages questions of care, thresholds of experience, and the social architectures shaping everyday life. A former medic with training in psychiatry, he holds an MA in Contemporary Photography and Philosophy from Central Saint Martins, London.

Zahedi's installations and performances often create conditions of attentiveness — to sound, space, and the bodies that inhabit them — drawing on his medical background to explore how systems of support and vulnerability are materially structured. His work has been presented at major institutions and art fairs internationally.

German painter, sculptor, photographer, and performance artist born in Dortmund in 1953 who became one of the most influential figures of his generation. Emerging in the early 1980s alongside Albert Oehlen and Günther Förg, he trained at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst and directed a Berlin artists' venue before building a reputation for work that attacked the pretensions of the art world with savage humor and relentless productivity. His 1988 self-portrait series depicted himself with deliberate lack of flattery. He died in Vienna in March 1997 from liver cancer, aged 44, leaving a body of work insistently critical of consumerism and institutional mythology.

Lussuria is a project of William Mayberry, a Detroit-based musician whose work combines post-industrial electronics, house, and synth-pop with a deeply intimate and personal quality unusual in those traditions. Releases on Hospital Productions and Malignant address the body, desire, and longing through synthesised music of considerable emotional directness. His practice is influenced by the legacy of Detroit's musical cultures — techno, gospel, and industrial — and maintains a consistent attention to the vulnerability of the self within electronic music. He is an important figure in the convergence of power electronics, dark ambient, and dance music in American underground contexts.

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was a Scottish writer and physician best known for creating the detective Sherlock Holmes, whose stories — built on close observation, deduction, and forensic reasoning — established many conventions of the modern detective genre and became a global publishing phenomenon from their first appearance in 1887.

Beyond Holmes, Conan Doyle wrote historical novels and science fiction featuring the irascible Professor Challenger. In later life he became a committed and vocal advocate for Spiritualism, investigating mediums and psychic phenomena — a turn that put him at odds with the rationalist reputation of his most famous creation.

Karl Salzmann is a sound and media artist born in Bludenz, Austria and based in Vienna. His practice moves across performance, installation, and conceptual art, with a sustained focus on the materiality of sound and the turntable as a research apparatus. He explores site-specific conditions, historical resonance, and the social implications of noise. His plaster record Bruchstücke (Moozak, 2021) — handmade in an edition of 20, intentionally shattered in transit — encapsulates his approach to process and fragility. He received the Austrian State Scholarship for Media Art in 2019 and holds a doctorate in Artistic Research from the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.

Nicola Ratti is an Italian electronic musician and composer based in Milan. His practice works with analogue and digital synthesis, modular systems, and tape processing to develop a sound that combines minimalist formal structures with warm, organic textures. He releases on labels including Important Records and Die Schachtel, and has performed and collaborated widely within European experimental electronic music contexts. His work is characterised by a patient, iterative approach to tonal development and a tactile engagement with sound as material. He also collaborates and performs with other Italian experimental musicians.

MZ.412 is a Swedish black industrial project, originally founded as Maschinenzimmer 412 in 1987/1988 by Henrik Nordvargr Björkk, Jouni Ulvtharm Ollila, and Leif Holm, and renamed in 1995 when Jonas Drakhon Aneheim joined. The project is credited as an inventor of black industrial — a synthesis of industrial noise, ritual ambient, and black metal — with key albums including Macht Durch Stimme and Malfeitor on Cold Spring and related labels. Nordvargr Björkk is also the founder of Swedish EBM project Pouppée Fabrikk.

Michael Barthel (born 1977, Berlin) is a German sound artist and musician based in Leipzig. Working in musique concrète, noise composition, and concrete phonetic poetry, his practice centres on voice and tape machines — a lo-fi aesthetic of brutal simplicity and fragility across more than fifty strictly limited releases. He has released on Tochnit Aleph, Scrotum Records, Geräuschmanufaktur, and aufabwegen, and runs Kunstraum Barthel, a Leipzig gallery and limited-edition publisher. Collaborators include Anna Schimkat, with whom he works in the duo A Vochel Wo Red, and Alessandra Eramo.

Macedonian artist Robert Gligorov works across a variety of media: video, photography, installations, and paintings. His primary sources are all types of images: from drawings to movies, graphics or logos, and comics. The admiration for art history masters – like Matisse, Piero Della Francesca, and Bacon – also nourishes his oeuvre. Formerly more focused on the body, its metamorphosis, and performance, Gligorov’s current research focuses on social and political issues. In his own words: ‘my goal is to investigate the meaning of things and stubbornly seek beauty and seduction of things’, despite the chosen medium and content.

New York musician Margaret Chardiet began performing as Pharmakon at seventeen after involvement in the Far Rockaway underground collective Red Light District, developing a practice in which harsh electronic synthesis and physical endurance converge to locate the body at its limits. Her debut album Abandon was released on Sacred Bones Records in 2013, followed by Bestial Burden (2014), Contact (2017), and Devour (2019), each exploring themes of bodily autonomy, mortality, and survival. Her performances are noted for their confrontational physicality, collapsing the distance between performer and audience.

Mark Pauline (b. 1953) is an American artist and founder of Survival Research Laboratories (SRL), established in San Francisco in 1978. SRL produces spectacular machine performances in which remotely controlled mechanical devices — designed by Pauline and collaborators — interact in displays of violence and destruction staged in industrial and public spaces. These events interrogate the aesthetics of technology and military machinery as extraordinary experiences. Pauline's practice draws on engineering, scavenged materials, and a disregard for risk — shown in 1982, when a rocket fuel accident cost him most of his right hand, an injury he absorbed into the work rather than letting it end it.

Wolfgang Spahn is a German artist and musician based in Berlin working at the intersection of light, electronics, and sound. His practice encompasses generative and algorithmic systems, self-built hardware, and audiovisual performance, often involving analogue electronics alongside digital and open-source tools. Spahn's work explores the boundaries between visual art and music, producing installations and live performances in which light and sound are generated by the same underlying processes. He has participated in experimental music and media art contexts across Europe and beyond.

Valentina Vuksic is a Croatian-Swiss sound artist and musician based in Bern. Her practice explores the sonic properties of computer hardware — particularly hard disk drives, data buses, and other electronic components — as musical instruments, producing rhythmic, texturally complex works from the electromagnetic and acoustic emissions of computational machinery. She has performed and exhibited internationally and releases music on digital and physical formats that document her investigations into the inherent sonicity of computing infrastructure. Her work connects to the broader tradition of hardware hacking and circuit-bending while maintaining its own conceptual rigour.

Anne Gillis is a French experimental vocalist and sound artist who has been a significant presence in the French noise and industrial underground since the 1980s. Her work with voice and electronics explores extreme sonic and emotional territory — shrieking, whispering, treated and processed vocalizations that locate the voice as a site of both vulnerability and violence.

She has collaborated with artists including Thierry Müller (Ilitch) and others from the experimental underground, and has released recordings on labels including Bain Total.

Philip Corner is an American composer and performer born in 1933 in New York. A student of Olivier Messiaen in Paris and closely associated with the Fluxus movement in the 1960s, he developed a practice that spans avant-garde performance, piano music, improvisation, and conceptual scores. His work Piano Activities (1961), which famously involved the destruction of a piano at a Fluxus festival, is among the iconic events of that movement. He has lived in Italy since the 1970s and remained active as a composer and performer throughout his long career, with releases on Alga Marghen and other labels.

Fenriz (Gylve Fenris Nagell, born 1971) is a Norwegian musician and one half of the black metal duo Darkthrone, formed in Kolbotn in 1986. Originally a death metal band, Darkthrone pivoted in the early 1990s to a stripped-back black metal sound influenced by Bathory and Celtic Frost, becoming one of the definitive acts of the Norwegian black metal scene. Since guitarist Zephyrous left in 1993, the band has operated as a duo with Nocturno Culto. Fenriz is also known for his solo projects Isengard and Neptune Towers, his encyclopedic knowledge of underground metal, and his staunch promotion of the DIY ethic — as well as for being involuntarily elected to his local town council.

Arie Altena is a Dutch writer, researcher, and curator working at the intersection of sound art, media art, and cultural theory. Based in the Netherlands, he has been an active contributor to the intellectual life of the Dutch and European experimental arts scene for many years, developing a body of critical and theoretical work that addresses the history and practice of sound art, electronic music, and new media.

As a writer, Altena has contributed to publications, catalogues, and online platforms focused on experimental music and media art, producing essays and analyses that situate artistic practice within broader cultural and historical frameworks.

Born in Kiel in 1943 and based in Berlin from 1979, he was an installation and object artist who built his practice around found industrial materials gathered from scrapyards, factory halls, and derelict urban sites. After the fall of the Berlin Wall the subject became central to his work; he followed the material traces of East German society, including a series of 45 handmade hydrant covers from GDR factories, each distinct as a record of workers' reality. He received the German Critics Prize in 1984 and the Art Prize of the State of Schleswig-Holstein in 1994. He died in 2016.

Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) was a British painter, novelist, and critic who co-founded Vorticism — one of the most significant British modernist movements — and edited the vorticist journal BLAST in 1914–15. Born in Canada, Lewis grew up in England and studied art at the Slade School of Fine Art before becoming a central figure in the London avant-garde in the years preceding the First World War.

Vorticism was the British modernism's answer to Italian Futurism and French Cubism, combining machine aesthetics with a fierce British energy and a theoretical program that Lewis articulated in the polemical pages of BLAST.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1982, Sol Rezza is an Argentine composer, sound designer, and radio artist whose practice centres on audio spatialization, field recording, and immersive multichannel sound. Her compositions fuse granular synthesis, multilingual voice samples, and surround sound technologies into environments that explore psychoacoustics and digital storytelling. In 2006–07 she traversed Latin America with the itinerant radio project Estudio Rodante, later living in Mexico for twelve years. Her 2015 work In the Darkness of the World was co-commissioned by the CTM Festival Berlin and Deutschlandradio Kultur.

The International Nothing is a Berlin-based duo of clarinetists Kai Fagaschinski and Michael Thieke, active since the mid-2000s. Their practice is defined by an extreme reduction of means: the duo plays only long, sustained tones on clarinet, working with the micro-differences in pitch and timbre between the two instruments to produce slowly shifting interference patterns and acoustic beating.

Their music is not improvised in the conventional sense — performances are structured through careful pre-planning and attentive listening — but it achieves an openness and fragility that aligns it with the tradition of lowercase sound.

Ursula Reuter Christiansen (b. 1943, Trier, Germany) is an artist working across painting, film, performance, ceramics, and sculpture. She studied at the Dusseldorf Academy of Fine Arts from 1965 to 1969 under Joseph Beuys, joining Fluxus and the emerging women's movement, and in 1969 settled on the Danish island of Mon.

Her 1971 film Skarpretteren (The Executioner) screened at the first international women's film festival in Berlin and entered the National Gallery of Denmark's collection. She often collaborated with husband Henning Christiansen, including on the 1986 film Den Rode Skov, and from 1997 to 2006 was the first female painting professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.

Boards of Canada is the duo of brothers Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin, raised in Scotland and later based in Edinburgh. Releasing on Warp Records from 1998, their albums Music Has the Right to Children (1998), Geogaddi (2002), and The Campfire Headphase (2005) established them as defining figures of electronic music through a sound built on tape-degraded synthesisers, decayed sample textures, and an uncanny nostalgia for 1970s educational film and public broadcast aesthetics. Their music generates a persistent sense of lost childhood and ambient unease. They have released music infrequently, with Tomorrow's Harvest (2013) being their most recent LP.

Pierre Gerard is a Belgian sound artist based in Brussels. His practice works with field recording, small acoustic objects and electronic processing, producing quiet, carefully constructed compositions that emphasise listening to the small, the peripheral and the fragile — sounds that exist at the edges of attention, easily overlooked, revealed by the act of careful recording and considered presentation.

His recordings appear on Herbal International, Unfathomless, Entr'acte and other labels specialising in reductive and field-recording-based work, placing him within a well-defined but diverse international field of practitioners dedicated to minimal and attentive listening practice.

Warthog is a New York City–based hardcore punk band whose uncompromising sound combines the speed and aggression of classic hardcore with a dense, riff-driven heaviness. Formed in the early 2010s, the group emerged from the city’s underground DIY scene and established a reputation for intense live performances. Drawing equally from punk, metal, and noise-inflected influences, they produce music that is direct, confrontational, and physically charged. Through acclaimed EPs on Katorga Works, Beach Impediment, Toxic State, and Static Shock, they have become a distinctive voice in contemporary hardcore while maintaining a fiercely independent ethos.

Ultra-Red is a Los Angeles-founded collective established in 1994 by queer activists within the Los Angeles AIDS crisis, using sound as a medium for community organising and political analysis. Rather than producing autonomous art objects, their practice develops what they call "militant sound investigation" — extended listening sessions, field recordings of political space, and audio works produced collectively with specific communities. Active in housing justice, immigration rights, and HIV/AIDS organising, they have produced records and installations in collaboration with communities globally. Their work challenges the separation between art practice and political struggle.

Born in Lubbock, Texas in 1951, he studied Spanish classical guitar and, raised partly in New Mexico, grew up bilingual in English and Spanish. He moved to New York City in 1976 and worked alongside John Cage, La Monte Young, Glenn Branca, and Pauline Oliveros. He founded the label Qbadisc to release Cuban music in the United States and co-produced the radio programme Afropop Worldwide. His book Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo (2004) was followed by The World That Made New Orleans (2009). He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005.

Josef Anton Riedl (1927–2011) was a German composer, conductor, and electronic music pioneer born in Munich. He was a central figure in the German avant-garde of the postwar period, working with electronic music at the Studio for Electronic Music in Munich and organising the legendary Ars Electronica-adjacent festivals. He collaborated with John Cage, Nam June Paik, and figures of the European avant-garde throughout the 1960s and 1970s. His compositions bridge serial technique, electronic processing, and the Fluxus-adjacent performance culture of German avant-garde institutions. His work is documented on Wergo and other European labels.

Charlemagne Palestine (b. 1945, Brooklyn) is an American composer, performance artist, and visual artist who developed a highly personal practice of strumming technique and ritual performance in the 1970s. His piano work — including Strumming Music (1974) — uses rapid, sustained patterns to generate overtone-rich tonal accumulations. He has performed with brandy and stuffed animals as ritualistic elements. A student of Morton Feldman's approach to duration, he released on Shandar and has been reissued on Sub Rosa. His commitment to performance as ceremony has remained constant across six decades.

Enhet För Fri Musik (Unit for Free Music) is a Swedish experimental and free-folk collective formed in 2015 in Gothenburg, bringing together members of the Swedish underground from bands including Neutral, Makthaverskan, Arv & Miljö, and Blod. The collective operates through an unusual process: members send recordings to Dan, who collates them, meaning the group has never played live together in any conventional sense. They release on their own Förlag För Fri Musik imprint and internationally on Ba Da Bing Records. Their music combines atonal guitar, organ, tape, saxophone, and field recordings, drawing on a lineage that includes Pärson Sound and International Harvester.

Los Frikis was a punk subculture that originated in the 1980s in Cuba, drawing together young people alienated from official Cuban society who were attracted to heavy metal, punk, and other counter-cultural music and aesthetics. In the economically desperate years of the early 1990s — Cuba's Special Period following the collapse of the Soviet Union — some Frikis made the extraordinary decision to knowingly inject HIV-positive blood into themselves.

Their motivations were complex: a desire for community in Cuba's sanitoria, where infected people were quarantined; economic survival with free food and medicine; and a form of protest against a state that they felt had excluded them.

A French-born electronic musician and composer based in Berlin, she grew up near Tours and studied art history before completing a sound studies programme in Berlin through a university exchange. Her practice combines computer music, sound synthesis, and algorithmic composition to create live performances and installations in which sound acts as a transformative element for both space and audience. Her debut album Multivocal was released in 2019 on Important Records. In 2024 she released Manifolds, commissioned by the Groupe de Recherches Musicales for its Acousmonium loudspeaker orchestra. She received a ZKM Giga-Hertz production award in 2023.

Kink Gong (Laurent Jeanneau) is a French sound artist and ethnomusicologist based in Asia whose extensive recordings of traditional and ritual music across Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and southern China have produced one of the most remarkable ethnographic and artistic archives in contemporary field recording. His Sublime Frequencies releases and solo recordings combine documentary and artistic approaches in ways that blur the boundaries between ethnomusicology and experimental sound. His commitment to recording musics at risk of disappearing gives his work both artistic and archival significance.

Wouter Jaspers (Netherlands, 1986) is an electroacoustic sound artist, composer-performer, instrument designer, and curator based in Berlin. His work brings together field recordings, radio transmissions, electromagnetic phenomena, analog noise, and self-built instruments to explore hidden infrastructures and sonic environments. Through performances, installations, and research projects, he transforms signals and environmental sound into immersive listening experiences. Jaspers is co-founder of KOMA Elektronik, where he developed the Field Kit series for experimental sound practices. Active since 2005, he continues to develop custom instruments through his project Sonic Artefacts.

Contagious Orgasm is a Japanese noise and industrial project formed by Shinya Iwanaga in Osaka in 1989. Working within Japan's prolific noise underground, the project has produced an enormous body of work across cassettes, CDs, and vinyl, ranging from harsh noise and power electronics to more textural and ambient approaches. Releases have appeared on labels including Ant-Zen, Malignant, and the artist's own channels. A long-running project of sustained intensity and variation, Contagious Orgasm remains an active presence in the international noise community and is one of the more prolific Japanese noise projects of its generation.

Born in Arona, Italy, in 1953, he studied electronic music at Milan Conservatory under Angelo Paccagnini and worked in parallel as an architect. His early concrete-electronic compositions, including Scorrevole and Fluttuazioni, integrate nature sounds and animal cries reworked with analogue Moog techniques and tape manipulation. With Gabin Dabiré and Walter Maioli he formed Futuro Antico, one of the most significant ensembles of the Italian avant-garde. In 1985 he co-founded the audiovisual art group Correnti Magnetiche with Mario Canali, producing installations and live-electronics concerts that merged computerised systems with sound.

Smegma is an American free improvisation and noise collective active since 1973, formed in Pasadena before relocating to Portland — one of the longest-running experimental music groups in the United States. As part of the Los Angeles Free Music Society, they have maintained a commitment to collective improvisation, free jazz, found sound, and noise across recordings and performances spanning five decades. Their releases draw on the traditions of American free music, Fluxus, and Dadaism, while their openness to later developments in noise and post-industrial music keeps their practice in dialogue with younger generations of experimental musicians discovering the group's vast archive.

Sven Väth (b. 1964) is a German DJ, producer, and nightclub founder who has been a central figure in European techno since the late 1980s. He was founder and resident DJ of the Omen club in Frankfurt — one of the earliest and most important venues in European rave and techno — producing marathon sets that made him a formative presence in the scene. He later founded Cocoon club in Ibiza and the Cocoon Records label, both significant to European techno ever since. His DJ sets are known for their length, depth, and sustained intensity, drawing on the Detroit and Chicago records that shaped his early sets at Omen and cementing his reputation as techno's most enduring mentor figure.

Cocteau Twins were a Scottish trio formed in Grangemouth in 1979, comprising Elizabeth Fraser, Robin Guthrie, and Simon Raymonde. Active from 1982 to 1997, they released on 4AD and built a sound defined by Fraser's wordless, glossolalic vocals and Guthrie's heavily processed, reverb-saturated guitars. Albums including Treasure (1984), Victorialand (1986), and Heaven or Las Vegas (1990) are central documents of dream pop and 4AD's aesthetic identity. Their influence on ambient, gothic, and shoegaze music was substantial, and Fraser's voice remains one of the most distinctive in post-punk history.

Henri Bertoia (1915–1978), born in San Lorenzo, Italy and later based in the United States, was a visionary sculptor, furniture designer and sound artist. After studying at Cranbrook Academy of Art alongside Charles and Ray Eames, he designed the iconic Diamond Chair for Knoll. In the late 1950s he shifted focus to sound, accidentally discovering the resonant tones produced by striking metal rods. This led to his celebrated "Sonambient" sculptures — tall vertical rods and gongs of varying sizes that generate ethereal, harmonic sounds when activated by wind, touch or performance.

Giuseppe Ielasi is an Italian artist born in 1974, living near Milan. He began playing the guitar in 1988 and worked for many years in improvised music before shifting his practice substantially in 2007, moving away from live performance with the guitar toward studio-based composition for CDs, records, theater, and film. His performances now involve multichannel diffusion and recomposition of pre-existing material, creating complex site-specific sound works from layers of accumulated fragments.

He has appeared at festivals worldwide and toured extensively in Europe, the United States, and Japan.

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) was an American poet and a central figure of the Beat Generation, whose 1956 poem Howl became a landmark of postwar literature and a touchstone for countercultural movements. Its publication led to an obscenity trial that became a key moment in debates over literary freedom in the United States.

Beyond poetry, Ginsberg was an outspoken activist for free speech, drug policy reform, and gay rights, and a tireless collaborator — performing with musicians from Bob Dylan to The Clash, chanting mantras at protests, and mentoring younger writers. His open verse and public persona made him one of the most recognizable literary figures of the twentieth century.

Born in 1973 in Ithaca, New York. He earned a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1998 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2000. Before art school he worked as a tattoo artist and designed flyers for punk and hardcore bands. His sculptures, drawings, and installations draw on the iconography of heavy metal and black metal, filtered through the formal languages of Minimalism and Post-Minimalism. Recurring elements include fluorescent lighting, architectural ruins, and destroyed instruments, engaging themes of violence, death, and pathological behavior. Solo exhibitions include shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.

French artist and researcher based in Paris, he studied visual communication at the Ecole Superieure des Arts Decoratifs de Strasbourg and received an MFA from the Frank Mohr Institute. Working under the name Recyclism, his practice investigates planned obsolescence, media failure, and the politics of consumer technology through détournement, hacking, and recycling. His ongoing ReFunct Media series assembles obsolete electronic devices into multimedia sculptures that expose the hidden possibilities of discarded technology. In 2018 he co-founded No, a non-profit focused on the social and environmental dimensions of information technologies.

Gunnar Schmidt is a German media theorist and artist whose work investigates the relationships between media technology, body, and cultural formation. His theoretical writings — on physiognomy, biometrics, and visual media — contribute to understanding how technologies of vision and recognition shape subjectivity and social control. As an artist and researcher, he develops projects that make visible the often invisible workings of media systems and their implications for identity and politics. He teaches at various institutions in Germany and contributes to interdisciplinary academic and artistic discourse.

Eliza Douglas is an American artist working with painting, performance, music, sculpture, and photography. Douglas is a frequent collaborator with German artist Anne Imhof. She has been a constant performer in Imhof’s work since 2016, first performing in “Angst I” at Kunsthalle Basel in 2016 and “Angst II” at the Hamburger Bahnhof also in 2016. Douglas also co-created the music and performed in “Sex”, Imhof’s 2019 piece for the Tate Modern, and “Faust”, at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, which won the Golden Lion.

Steinbrüchel is the project of Roland Wäger, a Swiss sound artist and musician based in Zurich. Working with field recordings, granular synthesis, and minimal electronics, he produces slowly evolving, extremely quiet works that occupy a space between drone, microsound, and environmental sound art. Releasing on Raster-Noton, 12k, and other labels associated with minimal and conceptual electronic music, his practice is characterised by restraint, spatial awareness, and a patient engagement with the smallest sonic elements. He has collaborated with Taylor Deupree and other figures in the minimal electronic music scene.

Arianne Churchman is a London-based artist born in 1988 in Suffolk, working across video, performance, sound, and sculpture. Her practice draws on British folklore, folk custom, and local belief systems, which she reshapes into ritual assemblages. Her ongoing Dream Horse Cult project reimagines Suffolk horse lore into feminist collective histories and psychedelic dreamscapes. She is a regular contributor to Folklore Tapes, appearing across its Calendar Customs and Art of Magic series. Sound works have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, NTS, and Resonance FM. She has collaborated with Chloe Langlois, Sharron Kraus, and Benedict Drew.

Yves Klein (1928–1962) was a French artist and a leading figure of Nouveau Réalisme, known for his intense blue monochromes, his theatrical performance works, and his Monotone Symphony — a single sustained note held for twenty minutes followed by twenty minutes of silence — which is a foundational work in sound art. Born in Nice, he was the son of painters Fred Klein and Marie Raymond, but his own work departed radically from their traditions.

Klein developed International Klein Blue (IKB), a highly saturated ultramarine pigment mixed with a synthetic resin that preserved its intensity in application.

Founded in 1998 in Australia by New Zealanders Honor Harger and Adam Hyde, the collaboration creates broadcasts, installations, performances, and online artworks investigating how broadcasting technologies can produce new artistic forms. Their long-running project Radio Astronomy intercepts electromagnetic signals from space via partnerships with radio telescopes worldwide, converting them into audio for live internet and airwave transmission. In 2004 the duo received a UNESCO Digital Art Prize for Radio Astronomy and have exhibited at Ars Electronica, NTT ICC Tokyo, and the Walker Art Center.

Yukio Fujimoto (born 1950) is a Japanese sound artist and composer based in Osaka. Working with self-constructed instruments, toys, found objects, and minimal electronics, he develops sound works and installations that draw on the Fluxus tradition while developing a distinctly Japanese aesthetic of small-scale, intimate sonic attention. His constructed instruments — including Ears with Chair (1990), a functional sound work — blur the boundary between sculptural object and musical instrument. He has exhibited and performed internationally and is associated with the Osaka experimental scene that includes figures such as Yasunao Tone.

Stock, Hausen & Walkman is the long-running trio of Matt Wand, Andrew Sharpley, and the late Anthony Burnham, active since the early 1990s. Working with tape collage, rapid cut-up editing, found audio, cheap electronics, and broadcast material, the group developed one of the most distinctive voices in British experimental music — assemblages of bewildering density and speed, in which fragments of speech, music, noise, and processed sound are compressed into intensely structured pieces. Releases on Hot Air, Staalplaat, and related labels document a practice that treats the edit itself as the primary compositional act.

Born in 1950, this English composer is based in London and entirely self-taught. He began working with a Casio FZ-1 sampler in the late 1980s, developing a method of assembling thousands of micro-fragments drawn from classical music, heavy metal, and free improvisation into dense, abstract compositions. Critics have noted his extraordinary feeling for musical narrative and his phenomenally painstaking working methods. He has collaborated extensively with double bassist John Edwards and percussionist Mark Sanders, documented on their 2017 trio album fgbh.

G Park is the musique concrète project of Marc Zeier (b. 1954, Jersey City, USA), who relocated to Switzerland in 1961 and has lived and worked in Zürich since, as a composer, installation and video artist, and plankton fisherman. A founding member of the Schimpfluch-Gruppe, he has been active under the G*Park name since the early 1980s, with a deliberately sparse output.

His compositions are built from field recordings — ice, wind, plankton, found objects — assembled into dense, enigmatic pieces. Early tape works gave way to Seismogramm (1990, Schimpfluch), Yack Park (1993) and Geopod (1995) on Zabriskie Point, with later releases including Reuters (2008) and the double CD Sub (2013).

Leilehua Lanzilotti is a Native Hawaiian viola player and composer based in New York. Her practice centres on contemporary and experimental classical music, particularly in the context of music written by and for communities historically excluded from Western concert tradition. She has premiered works by Ted Hearne, Zosha Di Castri, and many others, and her solo album with(in) (2022, Dear Life Records / Nonesuch) is a set of solo viola works by Native Hawaiian, First Nations, and Indigenous composers. She advocates through her practice for widening representation in new music institutions.

Emil Beaulieau is the performing alias of Ron Lessard, born 5 July 1957, who is also the founder of RRRecords, one of the central distribution and label operations of the American noise underground. His live sets feature a custom four-armed turntable — named the Minutoli after its maker — combined with feedback loops and everyday objects to produce high-velocity, unpredictable noise. First performing informally around 1985, Beaulieau has since released dozens of cassettes and several vinyl records on noise labels internationally, and has collaborated and performed with artists including Merzbow, Pain Jerk, and Richard Ramirez of Black Leather Jesus.

An award-winning artist researcher and lecturer based in the North East of England, her practice focused on listening, sound studies, and the sonic within specific environments and technologies. She co-initiated Stolen Voices with Johanna Linsley, an inquiry into eavesdropping that took the form of participatory workshops, experimental performance, new music composition, and the Eavesdropbox installation; the project's album was shortlisted for a New Music Scotland Award in 2021. She was lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory at Edinburgh College of Art and co-organiser of the Women in Sound/Women on Sound research network. She died in 2024.

Offal Letucce is a goregrind and death metal project based in New Orleans, Louisiana, operating in the underground extreme metal scene. The project works within the raw and confrontational tradition of goregrind — a subgenre defined by distorted production, extreme tempos, and visceral subject matter — and has released material including split recordings documented on Bandcamp. The project participates in the community of artists committed to the most abrasive and confrontational ends of extreme music culture.

Slavek Kwi (also known as Artificial Memory Trace) is a Czech-born artist and musician based in Ireland. Since the 1990s he has developed a practice centred on field recording, acoustic ecology, and electroacoustic composition, with a philosophical and scientific interest in non-human communication — particularly the acoustics of insects, frogs, and other organisms. His recordings have appeared on Sedimental, Unfathomless, and other labels, and his work has been presented in exhibitions and performances internationally. He co-founded the Irish Sound, Science and Technology Association (ISSTA) and has been based in Cork and Dublin.

Philippe Parreno (b. 1964, Oran) is a French-Algerian artist whose work spans film, installation, performance, and sculpture with a distinctive engagement with narrative, time, and the conditions of presentation. His films and exhibitions — including Snow Dancing (1995), No More Reality (1991), and the Ann Lee Project (1999-2002, with Pierre Huyghe) — investigate the status of the fictional subject, the temporality of the exhibition, and the relationship between image and action. He has presented at Tate Modern, the Serpentine, and numerous major institutions.

Born in Vevey, Switzerland in 1981, he studied international relations in Geneva before spending over a decade in Japan and the United States promoting Swiss experimental music and sound culture. He wrote on noise and improvisation for the Geneva newspaper Le Courrier and organised concerts of Swiss experimental musicians in Japan for Pro Helvetia. He later coordinated the ArtLab program at EPFL in Lausanne and became director of the La Becque artist residency, which opened in 2018 at the foot of the Swiss Alps.

Formed in Mexico City, Interface brought together Roxana Flores and Samir Menaceri in a duo that became one of the most distinctive voices in Latin American EBM and industrial music. Their 1987 debut LP Automata — home to the driving cut "Terregator" — announced an affinity for the hard-edged electronic body music being championed by Wax Trax! Records. A second album, Dictadura, followed in 1989, and a third release, Extinción, arrived on cassette in 1991. Dark Entries Records later spotlighted their work on the Back Up Dos: Mexican Tecno Pop 1982–1989 compilation, cementing their place in the broader history of the era.

French composer and sound artist working in electroacoustic and acousmatic music. He holds a master's degree in acousmatic music and sound art from the University of Marne-la-Vallée. His practice centres on spatial audio, live performance, and the sculpting of sound in time. He worked at French national radio on spatial audio projects before joining the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in Paris in 2018 as a programming assistant. He is currently authoring the Acousmonium Handbook, a manual on multichannel sound diffusion, and his concert works have been performed in France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.

Born in Boston in 1955, he studied under Alvin Lucier at Wesleyan University, graduating in 1977 with degrees in music and mathematics, then completed an MFA at Mills College under Robert Ashley and David Behrman. A professor and former chair of the music department at Wesleyan, he composes music and designs sound installations around custom-built electronic instruments. He pioneered the use of ultrasound in live performance with In Appreciation, introduced live sampling in Alphabet, and has contributed to the development of SuperCollider, the open-source platform for real-time audio synthesis.

Hecker is the alias of Florian Hecker, an Austrian artist and musician born in 1975 in Augsburg. Working with computer-generated sound, psychoacoustics, and a rigorous engagement with the history of electronic and algorithmic composition, he has released on Editions Mego, Mego, and other labels, and developed an important exhibition practice across major museums and art institutions. Collaborations with Reza Negarestani on Chimerization (2011) and with Okkyung Lee on Inspection III (2020) exemplify his approach to voice and language as sonic material. His work engages with philosophy, perception, and the limits of acoustic experience.

Moscow-born, Berlin-based artist-maker and researcher active since 1995 across print, documentary, live visuals, and sound. She has lived and worked in Moscow, Stuttgart, Buffalo, Munich, and Berlin. In 2000 she taught as visiting professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. From 2006 she organized experimental workshops and lab events under the nomadic platform aa-vv, covering low-tech electronics, circuit-bending, low-power electro-organic systems, and the amplification of electromagnetic fields.

Andrea Neumann is a German musician born in Freiburg in 1968 who studied piano at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin before developing her practice around the inside piano — a reduced instrument consisting of strings, resonance board, and metal frame, played with hands, objects, and electronics. A lighter version of the instrument was built specifically for her by Berlin piano builder Bernd Bittmann. She has collaborated closely with Annette Krebs, Axel Dörner, Burkhard Beins, and Toshimaru Nakamura, and is a member of the Phosphor ensemble, whose recording on Potlatch remains a key document of Berlin free improvisation.

Arv & Miljö is the solo project of Matthias Andersson, a Gothenburg-based musician also active in Enhet För Fri Musik and Heinz Hopf. Active since 2010, the project began as gritty noise and tape music with environmental recordings and failing electronics before shifting from 2018 toward lo-fi ambience described as "broken new age music" — bridging Swedish New Age electronics, DIY noise, and electroacoustic practice. A seasonal tetralogy of LPs (2018–2022) on Omlott documents this turn. He also releases on Discreet Music, Krim Kram, and Fragment Factory.

Born in Bratislava and now based in The Hague, he holds MA and PhD degrees in Musicology alongside a Master in Sonology from the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, where he studied with Joel Ryan, Frank Baldé, and Rebekah Wilson. From 2013 to 2017 he led the Multimedia study programme at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Brno University of Technology. He is co-founder and Artistic Director of the NEXT Festival of Advanced Music and of A4 – Space of Contemporary Culture in Bratislava, and performs using custom software and hardware within projects including Voice Over Noise, Shibuya Motors, and VRITTI, exploring generativity, gestural control, and human-machine interaction.

Throbbing Gristle was a British band formed in London in 1975 by Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter Christopherson, and Chris Carter, emerging directly from the confrontational performance collective COUM Transmissions. They are widely regarded as the founders of industrial music, coining the term themselves and establishing their own label, Industrial Records, in 1976.

Their recordings — including the debut album The Second Annual Report (1977), 20 Jazz Funk Greats (1979), and Heathen Earth (1980) — combined tape manipulation, synthesizers, found sounds, and abrasive vocals to produce work that was as much a critique of mass media and social control as it was music.

Media artist based in Mexico City, he transforms space through live sound performance, photography, and installation using field recordings, oscillators, sine-waves, and no-input mixing board. His album Morada, released in November 2023 on Mystery and Wonder Records, draws on these tools to shape intimate and spatially attentive environments. Alongside his performing work, he has curated the Umbral and ISO sound event series in Mexico City, gathering artists around experimental and electroacoustic practice. He has toured internationally and collaborated with European ensembles including a residency with the SQID ensemble at Kleylehof.

Nik Nowak (b. 1981) is a German artist based in Berlin whose practice centres on building mobile sound systems that function as art installations, political instruments, and acoustic objects of considerable power. His most celebrated work, Panzer — a caterpillar-tracked vehicle mounted with a high-powered sound system — has appeared at demonstrations and exhibitions, exploring acoustic power, physical presence, and political agency in public space. Trained at the Universität der Künste Berlin, Nowak's practice intersects sound art, sculpture, and political performance, addressing sound's capacity to function as both a tool of resistance and an instrument of control.

Lia Mazzari is an Italian sound artist, performer, and cellist from Merano, North Italy, based in London. She holds a BA in Sound Arts and Design and has developed a practice centred on cello, whips, and prepared objects using extended technique — collaborative, site-responsive, and spanning performance, installation, and urban intervention. She founded Silver Road, an interdisciplinary art space in a drained water tank in South East London. An Oram Award winner (2022), she also lectures at London College of Communication (UAL) and has been a guest composer at EMS in Stockholm.

Sonido La Changa is a sonidero from the Tepito neighborhood in Mexico City, founded by Ramón Rojo in 1968. Rojo began a vinyl record collection with material from the Sonora Matancera after his uncle bought a record store in the Historic Center of Mexico City. He started as a DJ, providing music at dances using a turntable, a Radson tube amplifier, speakers (called “trumpets” in the sound system scene), and his two-record collection, thus giving rise to the sound system, a name that gradually became associated with the DJs.

Fog is the project of Andrew Broder, a Minneapolis-based musician and producer. Active since the late 1990s on Ninja Tune and Anticon, Fog developed a style of sample-based hip-hop and electronic music distinguished by unusual collage, unexpected timbral combinations, and a refusal of genre comfort. Albums including Ether Teeth (2001) and Ditherer (2005) demonstrated both technical sophistication with sampling and a strong sense of melody and composition within unconventional electronic structures. Broder has also collaborated with other Anticon artists and worked in more acoustic folk and singer-songwriter contexts alongside his electronic work.

Born in 1979 in Paris and based in Marseille, this sound artist, improviser, and electroacoustic composer works across live performance, sound installation, and scores for film and dance. She employs experimental sensors including hydrophones, coil sensors, electromagnetic antennas, and piezoelectric sensors to capture normally inaudible phenomena. Her major multichannel installation Métamorphoses gives voice to the sonic biodiversity of the Rhône ecosystem through hydrophony and electromagnetic recordings. Her album Une Voix parcourt le Rhône was released in January 2019, and she has performed at festivals from Afghanistan to Chile.

Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru (1923–2023) was an Ethiopian Orthodox nun, pianist, and composer born in Addis Ababa. Trained in classical music in Egypt and Europe, she entered monastic life following the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the upheaval of her early life. Her piano compositions blend European romantic and impressionist idioms with Ethiopian modal scales and rhythms, resulting in music of rare spiritual intensity and originality. She lived for decades at a monastery in Jerusalem, where she composed and recorded in relative seclusion. Reissues on Mississippi Records brought her work international recognition in her final years.

Lebanese trumpeter, visual artist, and cartoonist born in Beirut in 1975 who took up the instrument at eighteen and taught himself through free jazz and non-idiomatic improvisation. His first public performances took place in 2000, and he became a founding figure of the Lebanese experimental music scene, co-establishing the annual Irtijal improvisation festival in Beirut in 2001 and co-founding Al Maslakh, the first label for experimental music in the region, in 2005. During the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War he improvised on his balcony as bombs fell, producing recordings of that confrontation. He is widely recognised as a key initiator of free improvisation practice in Lebanon.

Born in Seville in 1996 and trained first at the Cádiz Conservatory and then at Barcelona's Institut del Teatre, this performance artist and choreographer develops work at the intersection of contemporary dance, expanded performance, and visual art. Her projects question platform capitalism and hyperconnected image culture by placing bodies alongside smartphones, steel frames, and industrial machinery. She has been featured at Sónar and collaborates across disciplines, including a notable collaboration with producer Lee Gamble on the 2024 project Models.

Born in Maracaibo, Venezuela in 1976, Marco Montiel-Soto studied photography in Venezuela before earning a Master's degree in Sound Art from the Universität der Künste Berlin in 2011, where he is based. His work — spanning video, installation, sound, drawing, and found objects — carries an ongoing anthropological reflection on the Tropics, migration, and the poetics of homeland, myth, and economy. He has participated in residencies in Chile, Spain, and Italy and presented work internationally. His practice is shaped by what he describes as being both a traveller and an immigrant, constantly returning forward.

Harley Gaber (1943–2016) was an American composer whose work in microtonality and sustained sound created a small but extraordinary body of recordings. His Winds Gaber (1977) became a touchstone for drone music and minimalism, and it remains one of the most extreme works in the tradition of sustained tonal focus. Working with just intonation and extremely slow compositional processes, he created music of meditative depth and sustained intensity. His commitment to the most reduced and patient forms of musical experience made him an important and insufficiently recognized figure in American drone music.

Tahilian is a noise and experimental music project from Minneapolis, working at the intersection of harsh electronics, spoken word, and confrontational performance, engaging themes of alienation, violence, and subcultural critique through texture and volume rather than melody or conventional structure. Releases on independent labels document a practice valuing rawness and immediacy over polish, embracing underground noise and industrial aesthetics. Tahilian's performances are known for their intensity and refusal of easy accommodation, sitting within a lineage of American noise drawing on punk's confrontational energy and industrial music's fascination with repetition and distortion.

Adan Jodorowsky (born 1979) is a Chilean-French filmmaker, actor, and musician, son of director Alejandro Jodorowsky. As a musician performing as Adanowsky, he makes French-language pop and chanson with a surrealist and theatrical sensibility shaped by his father's influence and his own film career. He has released several albums on because and other labels, mixing pop songwriting with an aesthetic sensibility that draws on the theatrical and mythological worlds of his family background. He has also acted in several of his father's films, including The Dance of Reality (2013).

Oksana Linde is a Venezuelan composer associated with electronic and electroacoustic music. Working within the institutions and studios available to her, Linde produced a body of electronic music that remained largely outside mainstream distribution and critical attention for decades. Her compositions draw on synthesisers, tape studio techniques, and the electroacoustic research contexts that developed in parallel to the dominant centres of Western Europe and North America. Reissues of her work have introduced it to a wider international audience in recent years, establishing her as a significant and overlooked figure in Latin American electronic music history.

Oscar Powell is a UK producer, DJ, and label founder who established Diagonal Records in 2011 alongside Jaime Williams. The label began as a platform for his own early EPs — The Ongoing Significance of Steel and Flesh and Body Music — which established a sound incorporating New York no wave, industrial, EBM, post-punk, and ascetic European electronics into a distinctive form of club music.

His DJ sets melt jungle, post-punk, techno, and EBM with a brazen and varied approach that reflects his curatorial sensibility for Diagonal Records, which has become an idiosyncratic and important reference point in contemporary electronic music production.

Chris Watson is a British field recordist and sound artist, founding member of Cabaret Voltaire, and one of the world's most respected practitioners of location and wildlife sound recording. His Touch Records releases — including Outside the Circle of Fire (1998), Stepping Into the Dark (1996), and Weather Report (2003) — create immersive sonic portraits of natural environments with extraordinary technical and aesthetic quality. He has also composed music for David Attenborough documentaries. His work has done as much as any single artist to establish field recording as a sophisticated artistic and ecological practice.

Born in 1953 in Leverkusen, he studied painting at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin before turning to installative sound art, a practice pursued since 1978. His sculptures and spatial installations explore the interplay of acoustic and visual perception, using tensioned steel cables, modified instruments, and stones as sound-generating elements. A participant in documenta 8 in Kassel in 1987 and in both editions of the Sonambiente festival in Berlin, his work has been shown in major institutions and public spaces across Europe. He held the professorship for sound sculpture and sound installation at HBK Braunschweig from 2004 to 2020.

Matt Heckert is an American artist, musician, and machinist, a former core member of Survival Research Laboratories (SRL). He later developed his own Mechanical Sound Orchestra — large-scale mechanical and automated instruments that produce rhythm and drone through physical percussion, spinning metal, and pneumatic systems. His performances present the machines as an autonomous performing ensemble, generating music through mechanism rather than human gesture. He has exhibited and performed internationally, combining fine craftsmanship with noise music aesthetics and industrial spectacle.

Originally from Los Angeles and now based in Stockholm, he works as a composer, performer, creative coder, and sound artist across experimental electronic music, sound installation, chamber music, and software art. His practice engages cybernetics, aesthetic computing, and feedback networks in which miscommunication and chaotic processes produce emergent musical forms. He has received commissions from the LA County Museum of Art, MOCA Los Angeles, and Issue Project Room in New York, and has taught at UC Santa Barbara, Art Center College of Design, and CalArts.

Mexican ambient electronic musician (24 September 1952 – 7 February 2009) who combined pre-Columbian flutes, percussion, and indigenous instruments with synthesisers to create works of ritualistic intensity rooted in his native culture. His catalogue spans some twenty original albums, with highlights including Comala (1986) and the four-volume Prehispanic Music series, later compiled on a 3CD set in 2005. He collaborated with American synthesist Steve Roach, Spanish guitarist Suso Saiz, and French duo Deep Forest, establishing his work at the intersection of ethnographic sound and electronic composition.

Born in 1927 into a Transylvanian Saxon family in Sibiu, Romania, he was deported to the Soviet Union as a forced labourer in 1945 and returned to Romania in 1949. After studying German literature in Bucharest, he emigrated to West Germany in 1968 and settled in Berlin, where he became the sole German member of the French literary group Oulipo. His poetry treats language as sonic material through anagrams, palindromes, and extreme formal constraint. He received the Georg Büchner Prize in 2006, the year of his death, and his wartime experiences inform Nobel laureate Herta Müller's novel The Hunger Angel.

Composer and researcher working with acousmatic music and site-specific sound installation. He completed a PhD in electroacoustic music analysis at De Montfort University in 2014 and is a senior lecturer in music at Kingston University London. His compositional practice divides between acousmatic works — typically centred on a single sound source as generative core — and site-specific installations in which the acoustic properties of a location become structural. He led development of the OREMA project, an AHRC-funded open-access online repository and peer-reviewed journal for electroacoustic music analysis, designed to support collaborative scholarly engagement with the repertoire.

Atrax Morgue was the power electronics and noise project of Italian artist Marco Corbelli (1971–2007), active from the early 1990s until his death. One of the most rigorous and personally extreme practitioners within Italian power electronics, Corbelli developed a sonic practice rooted in the aesthetics of Whitehouse and Con-Dom but inflected by a specifically Italian intensity of imagery and an autobiographical dimension that gave his recordings a quality of lived urgency. His releases on Slaughter Productions combined harsh electronics with manipulated voice and found material in compositions that are abrasive and confessional, leaving one of the genre's most extreme bodies of work.

Born in 1960, she studied at Bristol University and completed a PhD in composition at Princeton University under Paul Lansky. She held academic posts at Sheffield University and Goldsmiths, University of London, where she directed the electronic music studios until 2003, before moving to a small island off British Columbia to work as a freelance composer and writer. Her electroacoustic works draw on everyday recorded sound to create what she calls a poetry of ordinary life. In 1995 she won the Holst Award, and in 2012 her interactive sound-essay Window won the New Media Writing Prize.

Formed in Tokyo in 1983 under the name Evil before adopting their current identity in 1984, this Japanese black/thrash trio built one of the country's most enduring extreme metal legacies. Guitarist and bassist Gezol founded Evil Records to self-release the group's earliest material, including their 1985 debut 7-inch pressed to just 300 copies. Their first full-length, Envenom, arrived in 1991 and was followed by Evoke, Disembody, Fetishism, and The Dwelling across the decade. Active for over four decades, they remain a foundational presence in Japanese underground metal.

Christian Skjødt is a Danish artist and composer based in Copenhagen, working at the intersection of sound, visual art and science. He holds a master's degree from the Royal Academy of Music in Denmark, completed in 2009, and builds site-specific installations where technical experiments generate immersive sonic environments.

He founded Tonometer, a vinyl imprint for exploratory sound and music. His 2017 installation ÆTER uses copper loop antennas and analogue circuitry to capture ambient electromagnetic waves, converting them into low-frequency audio in homage to Léon Theremin's invention, and his work has been recognised internationally, including by Prix Ars Electronica.

Louie Rice is a London-based sound artist who plays electronic and acoustic systems, utilising the physicality of the medium, signal chain, and spatial context to create disruptive audio, performance, and installation. In addition to his partnership with Luciano Maggiore on event scores, he’s a member of the trio VA AA LR with Vasco Alves and Adam Asnan, a radical experimental formation that explores the textures, physicalities, and instabilities of electroacoustic mediums, expanding the concept of musique concrète.

Born in Córdoba, Argentina in 1961, Enrique Ježik has lived and worked in Mexico City since 1990. His multidisciplinary practice is explicitly political, using weapons, war machinery, and industrial materials to critique censorship, surveillance, and institutional violence. His work La fiesta de las balas involved three glass-and-steel structures perforated with three hundred rounds fired by police-issued firearms, their recorded sounds played back in the gallery. He exhibited at the 2018 Shanghai Biennale with a large-scale sculpture later donated to the Power Station of Art. Performance is a central pillar of his practice alongside drawing, text, and architectural intervention.

Austrian composer born in 1955 in Seewalchen who studied double bass and composition in Salzburg and Essen before developing a body of electroacoustic and text-sound work. Active between 1980 and 1988, he produced pieces realized at studios in Ghent and Bourges that used readings from literature and newspapers, delivered by alternating voices and processed into layered sonic tapestries. A split LP with composer Max Keller documented his Sozialistische Musiker Initiative collaboration. His final composition, Pas Rien, was recorded at INA-GRM studios in Paris in 1988, after which he ceased composing, closing a decade of politically engaged sound practice.

Dutch DJ and producer. nthng works across dub techno, hazy ambient, and melodic techno, releasing on his own Transatlantic imprint alongside Delsin, Mörk, and Lobster Theremin. He debuted on Delsin in 2017 with Turn To Gaia, establishing a melodic, ambient-spirited approach to techno. His 2020 album Hypnotherapy on Lobster Theremin spans dub textures, hazy ambient passages, and mind-bending trance across a double LP. A deliberate anonymity around his identity and location has remained a consistent feature of his public presence.

Cucina Povera is the project of Luxembourgish-Finnish musician and vocalist Maria Rossi, based in Glasgow. The name, Italian for the kitchen of the poor, reflects her approach of working with what is immediately available, most centrally the voice. Rossi uses layered vocals, synthesizers, effects, and field recordings to build dreamy, hymnal soundscapes rooted in everyday sonic encounters. Her debut album Hilja appeared on Night School Records in 2018, followed by Zoom, the a cappella document Tyyni, and the fourth album Lumme, recorded across Rotterdam, London, Luxembourg, and Glasgow.

A Mexico City-based videographic designer and electronic artist whose practice spans experimental sound, live media, video, motion graphics, and projection. His work treats image and sound as interdependent elements, and he has contributed to a range of groups and platforms at the intersection of experimental art, sound, design, and research. He has worked as a lecturer, workshop leader, and speaker in academic and professional contexts, with work presented at museums, galleries, and festivals in Mexico and internationally. He participated in the Live Performers Meeting in Mexico City in 2013.

Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) was a German Jesuit scholar and polymath whose work spanned Egyptology, geology, music theory, optics, and acoustics, earning him a reputation as "the last man who knew everything." Based in Rome, he built an influential museum of curiosities and instruments at the Collegio Romano.

Kircher's inventions — including early megaphone and speaking-tube designs and the infamous cat piano — combined genuine inquiry with theatrical showmanship. Though many of his theories, including his decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, were later disproven, his encyclopedic curiosity made him a touchstone for thinking about sound, media, and knowledge.

Born on 6 December 1941, he received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin in 1964 and his MFA from UC Davis in 1966. His practice spans sculpture, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance, and since the late 1960s he has been one of the central figures of American conceptual art. Early video works from 1966 to 1970 used his own body to explore the role of the artist and the nature of repetitive action. His neon work The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (1967) remains iconic. He lives near Galisteo, New Mexico.

Tonner is an experimental music project operating in the space between drone, dark ambient, and industrial aesthetics. Working with synthesizers, processed field recordings, and analog electronics, the project creates dense, textured soundscapes that emphasize atmosphere and physical resonance over conventional musical structure. Releases on underground labels document a practice that values sustained immersion and slowness, drawing from traditions of Berlin-school electronics, power electronics, and post-industrial sound art. Tonner's work treats sound as an environmental force rather than a compositional object, prioritizing physical experience over conventional narrative.

Jean-Claude Eloy (b. 1938, Mont-Saint-Aignan) is a French composer whose work combines Western contemporary composition with the influence of Japanese, Chinese, and Indian musical cultures. A student of Nadia Boulanger and Pierre Boulez, he moved progressively toward long-form works that draw on Asian ritual and contemplative practices. Shânti (1973) for electronics and voices is a four-hour work of extraordinary meditative intensity. He has worked extensively in Japan and has presented major works at IRCAM and international new music festivals.

Joe McPhee (b. 1939, Miami, Florida) is an American saxophonist, trumpeter, and clarinetist whose work since the late 1960s has been central to American free jazz and experimental music. After military service, he developed his practice as a musician in Poughkeepsie, New York, recording his debut album Underground Railroad (1969) and establishing himself as a distinctive voice in the post-Coltrane free jazz tradition.

McPhee's playing encompasses both the lyrical and the intensely abstract, drawing from blues, spiritual music, and free jazz in ways that maintain contact with the roots of African-American musical tradition while pushing forward into experimental territory.

Bellows is an experimental project that explores drone, noise, and textural sound through the use of acoustic and electronic instruments, focusing on sustained tones, harmonics, and the physical resonance of sound in space. The project creates immersive listening environments in which time is slowed and attention focused on the smallest sonic changes. Its work occupies a zone between minimalism and noise, emphasizing materiality and duration over event. Releases circulate through underground channels, finding audiences engaged with slow, sustained, and physically demanding listening practices.

Formed in New York in 2017, this trio of Chi Dracula Orengo, Justin Schmidt, and Rob Hoffman merges EBM, industrial, goth rock, and deathrock with hip-hop aggression and Latin freestyle influences into what frontperson Chi describes as dark freestyle. The band layers sharp political commentary beneath their abrasive sonics and is known for their visual presentation, which features nun headpieces and a deliberately confrontational aesthetic. Albums include God's Exposure (2019), Baptized in Space (2019), and Morbid Now, Morbid Later (2023).

FUJI||||||||TA is the project of Yosuke Fujita, a Japanese sound artist active since 2006 whose practice centers on handmade instruments and immersive acoustic environments. In 2009 he constructed a pipe organ with only eleven pipes and no keyboard, powered by a blacksmith air pump called a fuigo and inspired by gagaku music. The instrument has no fixed pitch relations and evokes natural landscapes. He has performed with Yamantaka Eye of Boredoms, Keiji Haino, and Akio Suzuki. His 2020 album iki on Hallow Ground presented four long works for the organ. KOMORI documented the organ inside a cave at Mount Fuji alongside bats. His 2021 album NOISEEM uses amplified water as instrument.

Working under the alias Jane Pain, she is a New York-based photographer, writer, and musician who documents the present through the lens of her own life. A second-generation punk rooted in the city’s underground, she moved from playing in punk bands to keyboards in noise ensembles before settling into solo electronics. She is one half of Appetite, a power electronics and noise project, and has published the zine High On Hunger, combining personal essays, photography, and interviews with artists. Her 35mm photography is consistently visceral, alternating between the disturbing and the darkly intimate.

Michał Libera (born 1979, Warsaw) is a Polish sociologist, curator, and composer. Holding a PhD in sociology, he treats its methods and questions as the foundation of all his curatorial and compositional work. He is Music Curator at Ujazdów Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw and co-organiser of the Sanatorium of Sound festival in Sokołowsko. He has curated for Donaueschingen, Huddersfield, and Zachęta, co-produced reissues of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio archive on Bôłt Records, and authored musical adaptations of Thomas Bernhard, Witold Gombrowicz, and Italo Calvino.

Henry Flynt (b. 1940, Greensboro, North Carolina) is an American musician and philosopher who coined the term concept art in 1961 — preceding Joseph Kosuth's more widely known use of the term by years — and whose subsequent career has encompassed radical anti-art activism, hillbilly-inflected experimental music, and rigorous philosophical work on the foundations of mathematics, consciousness, and culture.

His philosophical writing on cognitive nihilism — the position that all thought is ultimately undermined by its own contradictions — is intellectually demanding and genuinely original.

Francesco Cavaliere is an Italian visual artist, writer, and sound producer. He lives and works between Berlin and Turin. His works are capable of enlivening his listeners’ inner states through a polymorphic activity that combines writing, sound, voice, drawing, and sculpture, undertaking long journeys crossed by ephemeral presences. He writes sound stories and music based on particles of sound, noise, and language, often integrated with installation and scenographic elements or live performance, showing a particular taste for the most diverse forms of exoticism.

JSPRV35 is an electronic producer with a recurring presence on Planet Rhythm, the Dutch techno label that has maintained a consistent output of hard-edged and experimental club music. The project's releases on the label include the Robotika EP, the Identity Malfunction EP from 2025, and the Transmission EP from 2026, building a catalogue that moves between techno and electro with a mechanical, functional approach to track construction. Individual tracks such as Intergalactic Funk demonstrate a playful willingness to stretch genre parameters within the label's framework. Planet Rhythm has served as the primary home for JSPRV35's recorded output.

British musician and composer born in 1966 who coined the term "dirty electronics" to describe an approach to electronic music that rejects corporate technology in favour of DIY construction, found objects, and physical interaction. He studied at Dartington College of Arts and completed a PhD in electroacoustic music at the University of York in 2002. In 2003 he founded the Dirty Electronics Ensemble, a large collaborative group whose performances are inseparable from the act of making instruments. The ensemble has premiered commissioned works by Merzbow, Pauline Oliveros, and Gabriel Prokofiev.

Trained as a painter, Vanessa Rossetto is an American composer and improviser based in Austin, Texas, whose work integrates field recordings gathered on daily walks around the city with chamber instrumentation, electronics, and found objects. In 2008 she launched her own CD-R imprint, Music Appreciation, releasing solo albums including Misafridal, Imperial Brick, Whoreson in the Wilderness, and the award-winning Dogs in English Porcelain. She has also released material through Erstwhile, Another Timbre, Kye, and Tone Glow, and has collaborated with Lionel Marchetti and Lee Patterson.

Death Is Not The End is a London-based record label and NTS Radio programme curated by DJ and researcher Shaun Blezard. Founded in 2014, it focuses on archival, ethnographic, and obscure recordings from global folk, gospel, pirate radio, blues, and soundsystem traditions — often sourcing from 78 RPM records, cassette culture, and private pressings. Its releases and radio mixes are distinguished by curatorial rigour and geographic breadth, presenting material from the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe with minimal intervention. The label has released compilations including Come, Let Us Sing and Have You Heard About the World Coming to an End.

Born in Nuremberg on 10 April 1926 to Jewish parents, he fled to Britain in 1939 as a refugee and spent the war years in various foster homes. He studied art in Cambridge, London, Antwerp, and Oxford between 1945 and 1953. In 1959 he issued the first manifesto of auto-destructive art, publicly demonstrated in 1961 when he corroded nylon sheets with acid before an audience on London's South Bank. He co-founded the Committee of 100 in 1960 and organised the Destruction in Art Symposium in London in 1966. His student Pete Townshend later credited Metzger's ideas as inspiration for The Who's guitar-smashing. He died on 1 March 2017.

Born Chantal Passamonte in Durban, South Africa in 1969, she was a composer and electronic musician who relocated to London in 1991 and signed to Warp Records, releasing her debut EP Ilanga in 1996. Her debut album One on One followed in 2000. Treating sound as sculptural material, her work combined intimate vocals, electronic textures, field recording, and chamber instrumentation. She toured with Radiohead, Boards of Canada, and Autechre, and performed at Glastonbury, Sónar, and All Tomorrow's Parties. She died in March 2022 at the age of 52, leaving a body of work that expanded consistently across two decades.

Family Underground is a Copenhagen-based experimental electronic group formed in 2000. Following the death of founding member Jesper Hedegaard in 2015, the project continued as a duo: Sara Czerny on bass, synthesizers, vocals, and drums, and Nicolas Kauffmann on guitar, vocals, and electronics. Working under their own description of Raw Data Music, they fuse free improvisation with psychedelic electronic drone, analog synthesis, IDM structures, and noise. Their approach draws on Danish analog aesthetics and an interest in transforming chaotic processes into something habitable. They maintain an active output through Bandcamp and have shared recordings with WFMU.

Bun-Ching Lam (born 1954) is a Hong Kong-born composer and pianist based in the United States. Her compositions integrate Chinese musical traditions — particularly the melodic and timbral characteristics of traditional Chinese instruments — with Western contemporary compositional techniques, producing a body of work that resists both easy exoticism and cultural assimilation. She has received commissions from major European and American ensembles and has been recognised with numerous awards. Her piano works, chamber compositions, and orchestral pieces have been recorded on various labels and performed internationally.

Based in Vienna since 2015, this Mexico City-born media artist and composer holds a Visual Communication degree from Centro de Diseño, Cine y Televisión and an Interface Cultures MA from the University of Art and Design Linz. Her practice spans performance, installation, and participatory work centred on time perception and improvisation. She has presented internationally at Ars Electronica, Transitio MX, and London Design Week. She is a member of the electroacoustic collective velak in Vienna and the artist-run space bb15 in Linz, and forms the ambient duo PZFTK with Greek artist Stella Markidi.

Goem is a Dutch electronic music project formed in the mid-1990s by Frans de Waard and Roel Meelkop. Working with computers, software, and a rigorously minimal approach to electronic music, their releases on Staalplaat and other labels — including Puur (1997) and Miniaturen (1999) — developed a distinctive form of functional and structurally severe electronic minimalism. Both de Waard and Meelkop have maintained extensive parallel careers in experimental and noise music, with de Waard running the Korm Plastics and related labels and Meelkop working across solo recordings and collaborations. Goem remains one of the more influential Dutch minimal electronic projects.

Telefonia is an experimental music project working with telephone and telecommunication technologies as compositional material. Drawing on the history of telephone-based art and the specific sonic character of phone networks — tone, interference, and transmission noise — the project develops compositions that use these technologies as both instrument and subject. Its work participates in a tradition of telecommunications art that includes Bill Fontana, Alvin Lucier, and others who have treated phone and radio infrastructure as artistic material.

Wichtel und die Wuchteln is a one-off project assembled in 2007 by Berlin publisher Klaus Sander, founder of the spoken-word label supposé. Contributors included artist Rosa Barba, Mouse on Mars co-founder Jan St. Werner, writer Oswald Wiener and singer Ingrid Wiener, and producer Anja Theismann.

The recordings set a double quartet from the Austrian choir Alpenland Mariazell against electronic production, pairing folk vocal tradition with avant-garde sound design. The two tracks, "Hämchen Hämchen" and "Wunderschöner junger Mann," were released by supposé in 2019, bridging the Wiener Gruppe's literary legacy and the Cologne electronic scene around Mouse on Mars.

Max Eastley is a British sound artist and improviser whose work with aeolian harps, natural phenomena, and kinetic sound sculptures has made him one of the most distinctive figures in British experimental music since the 1970s. He is known for constructing instruments and sound objects that are activated by natural forces — wind, water, the motion of the body — rather than by electronic means, producing music that emerges from the encounter between designed objects and environmental conditions.

He has collaborated with David Toop in a long-running partnership that has produced recordings and performances exploring the intersection of improvised music, natural sound, and installation.

Born in Berlin in 1980 and based in Paris, Anne Zeitz is a researcher, artist, and lecturer at the University of Rennes 2 whose practice spans photography, video, and sound. Her research centres on mechanisms of surveillance and mass media, theories of attention, and practices of counter-observation in contemporary art — the subject of her doctoral thesis (Paris 8, 2014). As a curator she co-directed the Sound Unheard exhibition at the Goethe-Institut Paris (2019) and co-curated Échos magnétiques featuring Christina Kubisch at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes (2019). She is an associated member of TEAMeD at Université Paris 8.

Juan Carlos Flores is a Mexican sound artist based in Berlin working under the alias Visions of Lizard. A former member of punk and black metal bands, his practice draws on distortion, noise, and industrial rhythm to construct saturated and abrasive sonic environments. He studied at the Institute of Sonology at the Koninklijk Conservatorium in The Hague, where his album Flesh is Dead was recorded. He founded Void Left, his own label through which he releases his music. His releases include Triptych, Darkshifting, and the EP Tribulation — works that apply industrial and metal-inflected abstraction to questions of systemic collapse and contemporary crisis.

Modeselektor is a Berlin-based electronic duo comprising Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary, active since the mid-1990s. Releasing on BPitch Control and later their own Monkeytown label, they developed a high-energy hybrid of techno, electro, hip-hop, and bass music characterised by maximal energy and an eclectic approach to bass-weight. Their collaborative album with Thom Yorke as Modeselektor vs. Radiohead — Moderat with Sascha Ring — extended their reach into more international alternative audiences. Albums Hello Mom! (2005), Happy Birthday (2007), and III (2013) document an evolving practice that prioritises physicality and cross-genre energy over stylistic purity.

Abruptum was a Swedish black metal and occult music group formed in 1989 by IT (Tony Särkkä), later joined by Evil (Morgan Håkansson, also of Marduk), part of the Swedish black metal underground of the early 1990s. Their recordings — characterised by extremely slow, dissonant structures, a harsh production aesthetic, and extended compositions structured around ritual rather than conventional song forms — were positioned as genuine expressions of Satanic practice rather than musical entertainment. Their debut Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectère Me (1993), released through Euronymous's Deathlike Silence Productions, became a touchstone for black metal's more experimental and dark ambient fringe.

Born in Eugene, Oregon in 1973 and based in Austin and Mexico City, this percussionist works at the threshold between acoustic and electronic sound, with focused attention to resonance, just intonation, and the physical properties of objects. Since 2003 he has organized No Idea Festival, an annual gathering of contemporary improvised music in Austin that has also expanded to New Orleans, Mexico City, and Mérida. Current projects include Resonance with Iván Naranjo and Fear of the Object with Norwegian video artist Kjell Bjørgeengen.

Mark Ernestus is a German producer, DJ, and record shop operator who co-founded, with Moritz von Oswald, the Basic Channel label and its Chain Reaction imprint — two influential platforms in techno. The Basic Channel aesthetic, developed through mid-1990s releases, fused the rhythmic depth of Detroit techno with the spatial processing of Jamaican dub, creating music marked by extreme compression and an enveloping sub-bass richness, influential on minimal and dub techno since. Beyond Basic Channel, Ernestus has worked in dub and reggae as Rhythm & Sound with vocalists including Paul St. Hilaire, and founded Berlin's Hard Wax shop, a key link between Detroit techno and the local club scene.

Dominique Vaccaro is an Italian visual artist and self-taught electroacoustic musician, grown up in southern Italy and long based in Bologna. He picked up the guitar at 12, listening to blues from his father's record collection, and later moved to Bologna to study painting at the Fine Art Academy, where he encountered musique concrète. That encounter shaped everything that followed. His practice centres on collage in an expanded sense — extending from visual work to sound — and he has spent years exploring the possibilities of magnetic tape: mixing shortwave radio, field recordings, voice, and guitars into dense, layered compositions.

Flower Travellin' Band was a Japanese heavy rock and psychedelic group led by vocalist Joe Yamanaka and guitarist Hideki Ishima, active from 1969 to 1973 and reunited intermittently since. Managed by Yuya Uchida and recording for Atlantic Japan, they produced a series of albums — particularly Satori (1971) — that combined Black Sabbath's heaviness with Eastern philosophy and Japanese aesthetic sensibility in recordings that remained largely unknown outside Japan until the international rise of interest in Japanese psychedelic rock. Their influence on Japanese heavy music and on international psychedelic revivalists has grown substantially through rediscovery.

Eyvind Kang (b. 1971) is an American violist and composer of Korean, Icelandic, and Danish descent whose work spans contemporary classical composition, free jazz, experimental rock, and cross-cultural musical investigation. He has been central to the Seattle experimental music scene and has collaborated extensively with John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, Bill Frisell, and Sun City Girls, demonstrating a versatility rooted in technical mastery and broad compositional knowledge. His albums — including The Sweetness of Sickness (2004) and Theater of Mineral Nades (2004) on Ipecac — engage Indian classical music, medieval polyphony, and free improvisation in ways that refuse fixed genre boundaries.

Ali Phi is an Iranian-born transmedia artist, creative technologist, and musician born in 1987 in Tehran and based in Toronto. His background spans environmental engineering and experimental film, and his practice encompasses generative audiovisual design, interactive installation, and electronic music made with Max MSP and Ableton Live. His work draws heavily on the architecture, ritual, and visual traditions of ancient Persia and the Middle East. He has performed and exhibited at MUTEK Dubai, Ars Electronica, and the Tehran Architecture Biennial, and is founder and creative director of the media arts collective Nullsight.

Jan-Peter Sonntag is a German sound artist and composer. Since the 1990s, he has repeatedly cooperated with scientific laboratories. Alongside the examination of human perception, the question at the centre of his artistic work concerns the visions of modernity – an unfinished project.
He studied fine arts, art history, music theory, composition, philosophy, and cognitive science and, in 2002, founded N-solab. He is a cofounder of hARTware-projects / HMKV, oh Ton, unerhört, and the sound-art-edition HORCH.

Crash Worship was a San Diego experimental performance ensemble active from 1986 to 1999, founded by percussionists Markus Wolff and Simon Cheffins. The group became known for confrontational live performances inspired by Viennese Actionism: three stand-up drummers driving industrial and tribal polyrhythms, surrounded by fire, explosions, and crowds doused in liquids. Banned from venues across the United States, the group toured the US and Europe through the mid-1990s and released several self-produced albums. Their final performance took place on October 24, 1999, in San Diego.

Dariush Dolat-Shahi is an Iranian-American composer and tar player whose work bridges traditional Persian music and electroacoustic composition. He studied classical Persian music at the Tehran Conservatory before pursuing advanced training in Europe and North America, eventually earning a doctorate from the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, where he studied under Mario Davidovsky, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and Alice Shields.

His compositions integrate electronic and computer music with traditional Persian instruments, exploring the timbral and microtonal properties of Iranian classical music alongside the possibilities of studio-based electroacoustic composition.

Born in 1978 in Osaka, Teji Sawai is a Japanese sound artist, designer, and director known for creating interactive sound and light experiences, working across product design, web, film, and advertising, and co-founding the creative studio Qosmo, Inc., with a career spanning major in festivals, art institutions like MoMA, and collaborations with artists like Daito Manabe and teamLab.

Taieji is also a member of the art collective teamLab, representing one of the driving forces behind the electronic sound scene in Japan in recent years.

Éliane Radigue (b. 1932, Paris) is a French composer whose career of over fifty years has unfolded across three distinct but related phases. In her early period (1968–1971), she worked with feedback and reinjection at the Studio d'Essai of French Radio, producing tape works from the sounds of the equipment itself. From 1971 to 2001, she worked with the ARP 2500 synthesizer to create three decades of slow, deeply meditative electronic compositions — works of extraordinary patience and sonic richness, including the ADNOS trilogy and the major work Trilogie de la Mort.

Suicide were an American rock duo formed in New York City in 1970 by Alan Vega and Martin Rev. Their confrontational, minimalist sound — Rev's hypnotic drum-machine loops and primitive keyboards beneath Vega's rockabilly croon, howl, and scream — was decades ahead of its time, predating punk while operating entirely outside its conventions. Their debut album, self-titled and released on Red Star Records in 1977, remains one of the most radical and influential records in American music history.

Their live performances were notoriously confrontational, frequently descending into physical altercations with audiences who didn't know what to make of them.

Jean Schwarz (born 1937) is a French composer of electroacoustic and concrete music, and a longtime composer-researcher at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in Paris. Beginning in the 1960s under the influence of Pierre Schaeffer, he developed an expansive body of acousmatic work that draws particularly on natural sound sources — water, wind, geological processes — processed and abstracted into sustained compositional meditations. His Ephèmère (1981) and subsequent works balance the physical immediacy of concrete sound with carefully developed formal structures. He has also worked extensively in sound design for film and theatre.

Dominic Richard Harrison, known professionally as Yungblud, is an English singer, songwriter, and actor. In 2018, he released his debut EP “Yungblud”, followed by his first full-length album “21st Century Liability”. In 2019, he released his second EP, “The Underrated Youth”, and the following year, he released his second studio album, “Weird!”, which peaked at the top of the UK Albums Chart and reached number 75 on the US Billboard 200. His third album, titled “Yungblud”, like his first EP, was released in 2022 and reached number 1 on the UK Album Charts, as well as number 45 on the Billboard 200 and number 7 on the U.S. Top Rock Albums chart.

Born in Zurich in 1970, he studied philosophy and film sciences at the University of Zurich and fine arts at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Lucerne before settling in Berlin. His practice as a sound artist, researcher, and composer investigates human perception through computational and phenomenological methods, with a focus on psychoacoustics, spatialization, and algorithmic composition. He co-founded the domizil music label with Marcus Maeder and has presented electroacoustic work internationally at venues ranging from micro-galleries to the Venice Biennale.

Volker Zander (b. 1968) is a German composer, curator, and radio author based in Cologne. He studied urban planning in Kassel and worked as a landscape architecture designer, while playing bass in the American band Calexico from 1998 to 2012.

In 2005 he founded Apparent Extent, a label producing records and projects with international visual artists. His own work explores field recording and the Trautonium, an early electronic instrument, performed as sonic walks or interventions in architecture and gardens.

Since 2012 Zander has composed music and sound design for theatre, frequently with director Kevin Rittberger. His work has been presented at documenta 14, WIELS in Brussels, and Q-O2.

Kouki Izumi (和泉幸奇) is a Japanese electronic musician and producer working in techno and experimental electronic music. Associated with the Aramitama project and the technoA label — a platform for Japanese techno music — he has released the Japanize EP (2014) and Signal Repeater EP (2021), among other works. His productions engage with functional techno structures alongside a more experimental sensibility, and he remains active in the Japanese underground electronic music scene through performances and recordings available on Bandcamp, Spotify, and related platforms.

Born in New York in 1944, she grew up in a multilingual household and studied Indian classical music at Mills College with sarangi master Pandit Ram Narayan before traveling alone through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan to reach northern India. A founding member of Daniel Moore's Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company alongside Terry Riley and Angus Maclise, she has published poetry and translations from the French — including works by Henri Michaux and René Daumal — and from the Middle Hindi, among them the love poems of Mirabai.

Coeur Atomique (Atomic Heart) is a French experimental music project working in noise, industrial, and electroacoustic territories. Associated with the French underground noise scene, the project constructs dense electronic compositions that engage with both the formal traditions of French musique concrète and the more confrontational aesthetics of European power electronics and noise.

Makoto Moroi (1930–2013) was a Japanese composer born in Tokyo who studied composition with Tomojirō Ikenouchi at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, graduating in 1952. He also studied Gregorian chant with Paul Anouilh and Renaissance and Baroque music with Eta Harich-Schneider, developing a wide historical and stylistic range that informed his subsequent compositional work.

He was one of the leading Japanese composers who introduced audiences to new musical styles and devices in the postwar period, including twelve-tone technique, serialism, and aleatory music.

Francis Picabia (1879–1953) was a French-Cuban avant-garde artist associated with Dada and Surrealism, whose restless practice encompassed painting, writing, poetry, film, and music. His sound-related legacy connects primarily to the Dadaist performance tradition — collaborative events with Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and others that mixed absurdist text, music, and image. His Ballet Relâche (1924) featured music by Erik Satie and film by René Clair. Picabia's influence on experimental sound practice is primarily through his theoretical and performative engagement with noise, chance, and anti-art, rather than through any sustained musical composition.

Pher is a music project releasing on Bedroom Community, the Icelandic label and artist collective founded by producer Ben Frost and Valgeir Sigurðsson. The Bedroom Community roster — which includes Nico Muhly, Sam Amidon, and Nadia Sirota — is known for music that integrates contemporary classical composition, electronics, and more personal song forms. Pher's contribution to the label engages with these values, working within an aesthetic of carefully produced, emotionally resonant music. Bedroom Community functions from Reykjavík as both an artist community and a recording facility.

Composer, researcher, and sound designer based in Marseille, Debade has been a member of the INA GRM since 2019, where he oversees the valorisation of its scientific output and coordinates teaching activities. He holds a doctorate in sociology and art sciences with research focused on diffusion of practices in experimental music worlds. His 2026 album Fragments of Soaring Vessels on elli_records draws on field recordings from the Calanques of Marseille, modular synthesisers, theremin, and piano.

Carlos Salom Freixas is a Mexican visual artist, photographer, filmmaker, and production designer. He began his career in the late 1980s with the Active School of Photography and as a performance art member of Sindicato del Terror. Through the 1990s he established himself as a video artist, receiving a Young Creators Grant, and co-founded Hartos Indios in the early 2000s, coordinating works by Jannis Kounellis and Shirin Neshat. He has since worked as production designer on major international productions including Bandidas and projects for Netflix, Amazon, and Paramount.

Akio Suzuki (b. 1941, Pyongyang) is a Japanese sound artist and instrument builder whose practice is rooted in attentive listening and the relationship between body, environment, and sound. After his early event-based works in Nagoya during the 1960s — including the self-documented "Throwing Objects Down a Staircase" event at Nagoya Station in 1963 — he developed a practice centered on what he calls "projection" and "following," tracking the behavior of sound in natural spaces.

In the 1970s, Suzuki began building original instruments, most notably the Analapos, an echo instrument constructed from two metal tubes connected by a coil spring.

Working between Naples and Berlin, this researcher and sound-oriented artist holds a double degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Naples Federico II and the Universität Osnabrück and is a postdoctoral researcher at Federico II. Her work investigates listening as a critical and autobiographical mode, with published research on the sound archives of Elias Canetti and on music as a means of processing collective memory. Her projects draw on feminist philosophy, ecocriticism, and psychoanalytic theory, approaching the sonic as a threshold between private experience and cultural inscription.

Henri Chopin (1922–2008) was a French sound poet and publisher whose work with voice and tape recording pushed poetry into the realm of pure sonic material. Working from the late 1950s, he developed techniques of extreme close-microphone recording that captured the smallest sounds of his own body — breath, heartbeat, lip sounds — and transformed them through multitrack manipulation into dense audio works. He also published the magazine OU (1964–1974), one of the most important documents of international sound poetry. His practice remains foundational for experimental vocal and text-sound work.

Self-taught Kenyan DJ, producer, and electrician who built his first wooden DJ mixer from magnetised metal pieces, bottle caps, and a dismantled cassette radio—later establishing his own pirate radio station broadcasting within a 200-metre radius during high school. Having saved enough money to move to Nairobi, he became an icon of Kenyan underground music culture, organising impromptu street parties with his handmade decks. His musical palette draws on dancehall, reggae, and East African sounds, approached with a guerrilla spontaneity compared to that of Lee Scratch Perry. His DIY methods and instruments have attracted wide international attention.

Silver Apples was an American electronic duo formed in New York in 1967 by Simeon Coxe III, who built and played the Simeon — a homemade instrument of nine oscillators, telegraph keys, and surplus electronic parts — and drummer Danny Taylor. Their fusion of oscillator drone, found sound, and driving percussion anticipated krautrock and electronic dance music.

Their albums Silver Apples (1968) and Contact (1969) sold poorly and the duo split in 1970, but were later hailed as foundational to American experimental music. They reunited in 1996; after a 1998 van crash nearly killed Coxe, Taylor rejoined before dying of cancer in 2005. Coxe continued as Silver Apples until his death in 2020.

Matthias Schubert is a German tenor saxophonist and oboist born in 1960 in Kassel, whose work spans free improvisation, electroacoustics, jazz and new music. He studied at the University of Music and Performing Arts Hamburg from 1979 to 1983 and is regarded as a leading German saxophonist, known for powerful playing, richness of ideas, and structural inventiveness. His ensembles include a quartet with Simon Nabatov, Lindsey Horner, and Tom Rainey, plus a trio with Carl Ludwig Hübsch and Wolter Wierbos. He won awards at the Jazz Festival de Meervart (1980) and the International Jazz Federation contest (1982), and with Martin Speicher founded Polytonale, a Kassel series for improvised music.

Peter Kutin and Florian Kindlinger are Vienna-based Austrian sound artists whose collaborative practice produces documentary and field-recording-based works. Christina Kubisch (born 1948) is a German sound artist and composer known for her electromagnetic induction installations and wireless headphone listening works. Together they have produced works engaging with listening, environment, and the intersection of different sonic practices. Kubisch's Electrical Walks series — in which participants listen to electromagnetic signals of urban infrastructure — is among the most distinctive sound art of the past three decades.

BJ Nilsen is a Swedish sound artist and composer based in Amsterdam whose work explores the intersection of field recording, sound, space, and perception. Through subtle electronic manipulations and detailed editing, he transforms environmental recordings into layered, immersive soundscapes that inhabit the space between reality and abstraction. His practice spans original scores and sound design for music, film, visual arts, and performance across a career of more than thirty years.

He began releasing music in 1991 under the moniker Morthond on Sweden's Cold Meat Industry label.

Disinformation is the project of British artist and musician Joe Banks, based in London. Working since the early 1990s with electromagnetic fields, radio noise, mains hum, and non-intentional electrical signals as his raw material, he creates recordings and installations that document the inadvertent music of industrial infrastructure. Releases on Ash International — including Solid State (1995) and Supermodified (2001) — present this material with minimal intervention, allowing the electromagnetic environment to speak with its own logic. His written work on the politics and aesthetics of interference has been published in Wire magazine and academic contexts.

American sound artist and researcher born in Gary, Indiana in 1964 whose practice centres on Electronic Voice Phenomena — anomalous recordings in which voices appear in otherwise silent audio — and its relationship to experimental music and field recording. He studied communication theory at Purdue University and the University of Notre Dame, and co-founded Phantom Airwaves, an institution dedicated to EVP research and education. Using field recordings captured at research sites across Indiana and elsewhere, he constructs dark ambient compositions that sit at the threshold between empirical documentation and acoustic art. His work is published by Touch, the London-based sound art label.

Dino Felipe is a Miami-born electronic musician and artist based in Berlin. Working in idiosyncratic electronic pop, noise, and experimental contexts, he releases music that refuses easy categorisation — moving between lo-fi bedroom electronics, absurdist humour, and genuinely strange compositional decisions. His releases on Schematic Records and other experimental labels are characterised by a playful irreverence and a willingness to embrace failure and accident as compositional tools. His work has connections to the Schematic Records scene alongside Phoenecia, Wagon Christ, and other artists working at the fringes of electronic music in the 2000s.

Hans Otte (1926–2007) served as music director for Radio Bremen from 1959 to 1984, occupying this position with remarkable artistic independence and vision. From the early 1960s onward, he frequently presented contemporary experimental American composers at his Bremen radio festival, Pro Musica Nova, introducing German audiences to figures including John Cage, David Tudor, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young at a time when these composers were relatively unknown in Europe.

His own practice as composer, pianist, and author produced works of musical theater, sound installations, poems, drawings, and video.

Australian historian and theorist of sound in the arts, born in 1951, whose scholarship has been foundational in establishing sound studies as an academic discipline. His book Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (1999) charts sound's role across modernism and the avant-garde, from Futurism through John Cage to Yoko Ono and William S. Burroughs. He also co-edited Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde and authored Earth Sound Earth Signal. He has held professorial positions at the University of New South Wales, where he was based at the National Institute for Experimental Arts in Sydney.

The Haters is the long-running project of G.X. Jupitter-Larsen, a Canadian-American artist active in noise and performance since the late 1970s. Working predominantly solo, Jupitter-Larsen has developed one of the most distinctive and theoretically grounded practices in harsh noise, consistently exploring themes of entropy, destruction, and physical process.

His performances and recordings frequently involve unusual materials and actions — sand, metal, deteriorating tape — used to generate sound through their own transformation and degradation rather than through conventional musical skill.

Alain Arias-Misson (b. 1936) is a Belgian-American poet and artist associated with the international concrete and visual poetry movements of the 1960s. Working across languages and media, he became known for "public poems" — large-scale interventions in city streets using letters, signs, and human bodies to turn urban space itself into a kind of text.

He has also worked in performance, sculpture, and prose fiction, treating language as a physical and environmental material rather than a purely literary one. His work connects the concrete poetry experiments of the postwar avant-garde to later traditions of text-based and site-specific art.

Ben Burtt (Benjamin Burtt Jr.) is an American film sound designer born on July 12, 1948 in Jamesville, New York, whose work at Lucasfilm and Skywalker Sound fundamentally transformed the aesthetics of cinematic sound. He is best known for creating the iconic sounds of the Star Wars universe—the lightsaber hum (a film projector motor combined with feedback from a broken television), Darth Vader's breathing (his own breath through a scuba regulator), R2-D2's voice, and the blaster effects—as well as sound design for Indiana Jones, E.T., and WALL-E. His philosophy of grounding science-fiction sounds in real-world acoustic sources, rather than pure electronics, became the industry standard.

Costes is the alias of Jean-Louis Costes, a French musician, performer, and provocateur active since the 1980s. His work combines lo-fi electronic pop, grotesque theatre, transgressive performance, and noise in a practice that consistently pursues extremity and cultural offense. He has released prolifically across cassettes and CD-Rs, performed internationally — often in elaborate and deeply confrontational costume — and maintained a singular position in the international underground as a figure of sustained provocation. His releases have appeared on various DIY and underground labels. His work is simultaneously absurd and formally consistent.

Swedish sisters Nadine Byrne and Tanya Byrne launched Ectoplasm Girls in Stockholm in 2007, initially as an audiovisual exploration of shared experiences with death and dreams. Their sound draws from punk, industrial, and minimal wave, producing work described as distant, muted, and quietly unsettling. Their debut album TxN appeared in 2011 on iDEAL Recordings, and their third LP New Feeling Come (2016) was listed among The Wire magazine's fifty best releases of the year. Related solo projects include Nadine Byrne's The Magic State and Tanya Byrne's Hypnotower.

Esquivel (Juan García Esquivel, 1918–2002) was a Mexican bandleader, pianist, and arranger whose work in the late 1950s and early 1960s defined the Space Age Pop genre. Working in elaborate stereo sound design with orchestras of unusual instrumentation — divided across left and right channels with dramatic spatial contrast — he developed a vocabulary of orchestral novelty that was simultaneously kitsch and formally sophisticated. Albums including Other Worlds Other Sounds (1958) and Infinity in Sound (1960) on RCA Victor are among the most inventive orchestral records of the period. Rediscovered in the 1990s, his influence on lounge revival and experimental pop has been substantial.

Born in Abbotsford, British Columbia, in 1949, he studied art history at the University of British Columbia before becoming closely associated with the Vancouver School of photoconceptual art in the 1970s. His practice encompassed photography, film, painting, performance, and music, often drawing on literary, philosophical, and popular-cultural references to construct wry, formally rigorous works. He represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in 1997 with Vexation Island, a 35mm film loop depicting a shipwrecked figure repeating the same futile action. In 2016 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada. He died in October 2022 at the age of seventy-three.

Born in Jakarta in 1975 to a Japanese-Indonesian family, he is a musician, singer-songwriter, music director, and producer whose work spans jazz, electronic music, and film scoring. He co-founded the group Sore in 2001, whose debut album Centralismo appeared on Time Asia's list of five Asian albums worth buying. After leaving Sore in 2012 he founded the label Ivy League Music and developed a solo practice and film composition career. His score for the 2018 Indonesian film Memories of My Body earned him Best Original Score at the 2019 Indonesian Film Festival.

Born in Gifu, Japan in 1966 and based between Paris and Kyoto, he began his career in audiovisual production at Spiral Gallery in Tokyo in the early 1990s before joining the Kyoto artist collective Dumb Type in 1993 as a sound collaborator. His practice uses pure data, mathematics, and code to generate immersive audiovisual installations and performances that convert information into light and sound at extreme scale. His work matrix received the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica in 2001, and in 2014 he was awarded an artist residency at CERN in Geneva, where he collaborated with physicists on particle physics research.

Sven-Åke Johansson (born 1943) is a Swedish percussionist, composer, and poet based in Berlin since the late 1960s. A central figure in the European free improvisation scene, he co-founded the Globe Unity Orchestra and has collaborated with Alexander von Schlippenbach, Peter Brötzmann, and Derek Bailey among many others. Alongside his free improvisation practice, he has developed a substantial body of textual and theatrical work, including happenings, poetry performances, and composed music that incorporates absurdist and Dadaist elements. His wide-ranging activity across six decades has made him one of the most distinctive and underappreciated figures in German experimental music.

Ella van der Woude is a Swiss-Dutch composer and pianist based in Amsterdam. Trained at the Amsterdam Conservatory and the Amsterdam Film Academy, her practice spans solo piano works and film scores. Her album Solo Piano (Snowstar Records, 2020) was recorded in her apartment; her film scores include Instinct (Halina Reijn, 2019), Moloch (2022), Silver Haze (2023), and Armand (2024, Cannes Prix de la meilleure création sonore). She has won two Golden Calves for Best Film Score and composed the score for Charlie Kaufman's How to Shoot a Ghost. She is the first and only female composer to win a Golden Calf.

Dumb Type is an interdisciplinary art collective founded in 1984 in Kyoto by students at the Kyoto City University of Arts. Spanning visual art, theatre, dance, architecture, music, and programming, they built a reputation for multimedia performances interrogating consumer culture and information overload. Their 1994 performance S/N confronted Japan's silence around AIDS, addressing gay identity, sex work, and stigma at a moment of near-total suppression. The work followed founding member Teiji Furuhashi's disclosure of his HIV status; he died in 1995. Under Shiro Takatani, the collective maintains an international presence with retrospectives at the Centre Pompidou-Metz and Haus der Kunst.

Sun Ra (Le Sony'r Ra, c. 1914–1993) was one of the most original and prolific musicians in jazz history, moving from Fletcher Henderson-style swing to free jazz and beyond, sometimes in the same song. Claiming to have originated on Saturn rather than Alabama, where he was actually born, he built a cosmology around the African-American experience, ancient Egyptian mythology, and outer space, using the Arkestra — his large, continuously evolving ensemble — as the vehicle for an ongoing creative experiment that lasted nearly fifty years.

Canadian sound artist, writer, and radio producer born in Oshawa, Ontario in 1953, he studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design before establishing himself in Toronto. His work draws on documentary and the politics of sound reproduction, treating loudspeaker transmission as a site of political meaning. He produced the radio art programme The Problem with Language on CKLN Toronto from 1987 to 1991, and co-edited two foundational anthologies: Sound by Artists (1990) and Radio Rethink: Art, Sound and Transmission (1994), both essential texts in the history of Canadian sound art and radio practice.

Victor Kägli works within the experimental and electronic underground, a milieu where artists often perform under invented names, release through small independent labels or self-distribution, and leave little conventional press trail.

Work circulating under this name follows the practice common to that scene: pieces built from synthesis, field recording, and processed sound, presented in small venues, radio sessions, and DIY spaces rather than larger commercial circuits, with documentation scattered across compilations, cassette runs, and online profiles.

As with many such names, a fuller picture depends on direct connections within these networks rather than searchable archives.

Carsten Seiffarth (b. 1963, Berlin) has worked since 1991 as a curator and producer for sound installation art and contemporary music, becoming one of the most significant figures in the promotion and contextualization of sound art in Germany. He has curated numerous solo and group exhibitions in Germany and internationally, supporting artists working at the intersection of visual art and sound.

He served as a member of the artistic direction of the Media Art Laboratory TESLA in Berlin from 2005 to 2007, and was artistic director of Sound Exchange: Experimental Music Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe in 2011–12.

subtractiveLAD (Lad Kordac, 1977–2017) was an American electronic musician and modular synthesist based in Colorado. He was a significant figure in the online modular synthesis community, known for his detailed tutorials, experimental electronic compositions, and advocacy for analogue synthesis. His work demonstrated the expressive potential of modular systems in free improvisation and composition, and his online presence taught generations of producers about synthesis techniques. He died unexpectedly in 2017; his recordings and video tutorials remain widely circulated.

Annette Wolfsberger is a Dutch-Austrian cultural producer, curator, and director active at the intersection of contemporary art, experimental music, and cultural policy. She holds an MA in Political Science from the University of Vienna and has developed her career across artistic programming, institutional leadership, and transnational cultural projects.

She is director of W139, a leading artist-driven production and presentation space for contemporary art in Amsterdam, known for its experimental programming and commitment to emerging and process-based practice. In this role she has championed ambitious, risk-taking projects that expand the boundaries of what art institutions can do.

Olaf Val (born 1968) is a German media artist and educator based in Kassel. Trained at Kunsthochschule Kassel (1995–2000) and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (2000–2003), his practice spans digital art, video, installation, interactive electronics, and game art. Since 2019 his work has shifted toward climate art, addressing CO2 consumption, algorithmic control, consumerism, and sustainable computing through works such as RE5IDUAL VEGETAT!ON, PAR7ICLES, and CO2Budget.js. He has exhibited at ZKM Karlsruhe, Museum Fridericianum, and Casino Luxembourg, and has taught at Kunsthochschule Kassel since 2005.

Arne Nordheim (1931–2010) was a Norwegian composer who pioneered electronic and electroacoustic music in Scandinavia, becoming his country's most celebrated contemporary composer. Born in Larvik, he studied piano and composition at the Oslo Conservatory before encountering electronic music at Norwegian Broadcasting, where he became a central figure.

His early electronic works, including Epitaffio (1963) and Colorazione (1968), brought him international recognition, and he represented Norway at Expo 70 in Osaka with the large-scale installation Solitaire.

Born in 1975 in Fountain Valley, California, and based in Los Angeles, he is a musician, author, and publisher who works under the imprint Stagger Fancy Press. As one half of the duo ACID with Imaad Wasif, he records and performs using rewired keyboards, detuned guitars, and home-made instruments. His solo release Beach Boys House: Dirt Sounds (2017) is an eighteen-minute field recording made at the Hawthorne, California house where Brian Wilson grew up, pressed onto a hand-made record containing soil from the site, issued fifty years after Pet Sounds. ACID's trilogy Romance, Science Fiction with Acid, and Persona appeared on Narnack Records in 2014.

Disband was an all-female No Wave performance group active in New York City from 1978 to 1982. Founded by Martha Wilson, Daile Kaplan, and Barbara Ess, its core members included Ilona Granet, Donna Henes, Ingrid Sischy, Diane Torr, and Martha Wilson; early participants also included April Gornick and Barbara Kruger, who wrote some of their songs. Modelled on the formal structure of a rock band but composed entirely of visual artists and non-musicians, the group quickly abandoned conventional instruments in favour of voices, harmonies, clapping, and stomping — producing a kind of a cappella No Wave that was witty, physically direct, and intellectually biting.

Jacob Ullmann (b. 1958) is a German composer whose work — often for solo instruments in combination with subtle electronic processing — explores extreme quietness, duration, and the limits of perceptibility. His pieces require exceptional listening conditions and concentration; sounds are often so quiet as to blur the boundaries between music and ambient noise. He has released on Edition Wandelweiser and is associated with the Wandelweiser group's investigations of silence and extreme dynamics. His compositions are among the most demanding and rewarding in contemporary experimental music.

Born in 1979, he lives and works in Metz, France, and is a self-taught composer and improviser whose background is in drums. Since 2001 he has worked in the fields of electronics and experimental and improvised music, performing with a dedicated no-input feedback system and developing research with a Serge modular synthesizer. He is the founder of Eich Records and the Fragment ensemble. He has composed for dance and contemporary ensembles including Ensemble Dedalus and collaborated with Marc Baron, Jean-Luc Guionnet, and Jérôme Noetinger, releasing recordings including the duo album Nos Cadavres with Noetinger.

Born in Beaumont, Texas on August 14, 1946, he developed the slap bass technique not as an aesthetic choice but out of necessity: when his mother's trio lost its drummer, he used his thumb to replicate kick-drum hits and his fingers to snap snare accents. That innovation transformed the bass's role in popular music. He played with Sly and the Family Stone from 1967 to 1972, appearing on landmark recordings including Stand! and There's a Riot Goin' On. He then formed Graham Central Station, scoring the R&B hit Can You Handle It in 1974. In 1993 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Sly and the Family Stone.

Adam Morris is a British percussionist and composer whose training began on violin and clarinet before settling on percussion. He studied at Colchester Institute and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where he completed a first-class BA and an MMus with distinction. His performance work has ranged across jazz combos, show bands on Caribbean cruise ships, and contemporary classical settings including the National Symphony Orchestra. He has toured extensively across Europe as a live musician supporting acts including Jim Thirlwell and productions of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. Morris also composes original work spanning experimental and contemporary idioms.

Born in Japan in 1967, Aki Onda is an electronic musician, composer, and visual artist based in New York. Since 1988 he has used a cassette Walkman as a field recording instrument, accumulating a sound diary of environmental recordings gathered during years of travel. In performances under the title Cassette Memories, he physically manipulates multiple Walkmans simultaneously, layering and looping this archive into ritualistic sonic collages. The three Cassette Memories albums — Ancient and Modern (2003), Bon Voyage!, and South of the Border — were reissued on Room40 in 2020. He has collaborated with Ken Jacobs, Michael Snow, Paul Clipson, and Akio Suzuki.

Born in Düsseldorf in 1942, Ferdinand Kriwet is a German intermedia artist who developed a body of work crossing radio plays, visual text installations, film, and concrete poetry. His Hörtexte (Radiotexts) series, produced for German public radio broadcasters across the 1960s and 1970s, assembled edited sound bites from mass media broadcasts into complex sonic collages. His 1969 work Apollo Amerika documented the Apollo 11 mission through recordings and film shot in New York, while Campaign (1973) applied the same method to electoral politics. Text, sound, and the mechanics of mass communication are interwoven throughout his practice.

Thomas Tilly is a French sound artist and composer working primarily with field recordings, electroacoustic music, and the documentation of biological and ecological sound environments. Based in France, he has developed a long-term practice of listening to and recording animal communication systems — particularly insects, birds, and other non-human sonic worlds — which he transforms into complex multichannel compositions and installations.

His work is notable for its scientific rigor as well as its aesthetic sophistication.

Akira Rabelais is an American composer, poet, and software programmer whose work engages experimental sound processing and magic realism. He studied composition at Bennington College under Bill Dixon and completed an MFA at CalArts under Morton Subotnick. His 1999 debut Elongated Pentagonal Pyramid appeared on Ritornell, followed by the widely cited Spellewauerynsherde on Samadhi Sound (2004). He developed the audio processing software Argeiphontes Lyre, used by Biosphere, Terre Thaemlitz, and Scanner. His 2019 album cxxi on Boomkat Editions features Ben Frost, Harold Budd, and Stephan Mathieu.

Born in 1968 in Dortmund, he studied visual arts in Münster and lives and works as a composer, musician, and audiovisual artist in Cologne, where he has been a professor at the Kunsthochschule Kassel since 2013. His interest in experimental music and concept art was shaped by Phill Niblock and performances at Het Apollohuis in Eindhoven. He founded mex e.V. in 1992 with Waldo Riedl to promote cross-media and experimental music. His installation G-Player (2004), Small World Machine (2011), and drone installation TETRAKTYS, featuring four automated aerial drones referencing the Music of the Spheres, are among his best-known works. He received a Villa Aurora grant in 2003.

Joachim Nordwall is a Swedish musician, composer, and label operator whose work spans harsh noise, drone, and dark electronics. He runs the iDEAL Recordings label, which has released work by artists including Merzbow, Consumer Electronics, Ramleh, and many others important to the noise and industrial music underground. As a musician under his own name, he creates recordings and performs live in ways that draw on the extreme ends of experimental electronic music. His dual role as artist and label operator has made him a central figure in the European noise underground.

One of the leading figures of new media art in the San Francisco Bay Area, he founded 7hz in 1995, a warehouse performance venue that served as the city's primary space for noise and experimental music until 2002. His practice centres on works for sound and video in which images generate sound and sound generates images, most fully realised in the Static Room and TV-IV series. He received an Honorable Mention at the 2005 Prix Ars Electronica and has exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and at festivals in Australia, China, Taiwan, Japan, and the Netherlands.

British power electronics project formed in 1982 by Philip Best at the age of 14 in the United Kingdom. Best joined Whitehouse in 1983 and Consumer Electronics lay dormant for much of the following decades, but after his departure from Whitehouse in 2008 he revived it as a trio with his partner Sarah Froelich and Russell Haswell. Known for confrontational performances and cassette releases that helped define and distribute the power electronics genre in the early 1980s, the project has continued to produce work exploring themes of violence, control, and societal coercion.

Allen Homburg is a sound practitioner based in Kassel working across film sound design and live performance. His credits include sound and sound design work on German independent film productions. He participates in Kassel's experimental sound community, including performance at the RANGE Sound Festival — a festival presenting experimental music, sound art, and installation hosted partly at the Mimikri Galerie in Schillerviertel — where he performed the piece Stanchion. His practice moves between studio sound work and the context of live and site-specific experimental music presentation.

Born in 1983, this Helsinki-based interdisciplinary artist graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2013, also completing the joint Nordic Sound Art programme across five Scandinavian art academies in 2012. His installations combine programming, sound, and physical objects to address political and philosophical concerns. Under the name Forces he produces densely atomised electronic music using live-coding and processing techniques, releasing on labels including Infinite Machine and Genot Centre. He co-organises Algorave Helsinki and has appeared in mixes by Aphex Twin and ZULI.

Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952–2023) was a Japanese musician, composer, and producer. A founding member of Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1978, his solo work ranged from pioneering electronic pop through film scores — Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), The Last Emperor (1987, Academy Award), The Revenant (2015) — to late-career ambient and avant-garde records including async (2017) and 12 (2023), completed while being treated for cancer. Engaged throughout his career with environmental politics and the intersection of technology and nature, he left one of the most diverse bodies of work in contemporary music.

Raven Chacon (b. 1977) is a Diné (Navajo) composer, sound artist, and activist from New Mexico, whose practice spans graphic scores, chamber music, sound installation, and collaborative work with Native American communities. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2022 for Voiceless Mass, composed for pipe organ and ensemble at the Milwaukee Art Museum. As a co-founder of the Postcommodity collective, he engaged in large-scale land art and media interventions addressing Indigenous sovereignty and US-Mexico border politics. His graphic scores — functioning simultaneously as musical notation and visual art — have been performed internationally and collected by major institutions.

Born in 1962, Koch lives and works in Cologne, where he studied composition with Johannes Fritsch at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln from 1988 to 1995. His work spans chamber and orchestral pieces, experimental scores for instruments with computers and everyday objects, sound installations, and electronic music. Since the 1980s he has engaged with the concept of total harmony introduced by Russian composer Nikolai Obouhow, developing a body of works he calls the O. theorem. He has been a professor of sound at the Academy for Media Arts Cologne since 2016, and his deep engagement with John Cage and Morton Feldman extends to performance as well as composition.

Mireille Chamass-Kyrou was a Musique Concrète composer born in Cairo in 1931. She studied piano with Brigitte Schiffer at the State Institute for the Education of Women in Fine Arts in Cairo. In 1955, she moved to Paris and studied under Oliver Messiaen.

In 1958, she joined the Groupe de Recherche Musicale, founded by Pierre Schaeffer. She worked with the GRM for four years, contributing to the system of musical notation for musique concrète that was eventually published by Schaeffer. She left GRM in 1961.

Franco Evangelisti (1926–1980) was an Italian composer who studied at Darmstadt and became one of the most radical figures in Italian post-war music. Associated with Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza — which has the distinction of being one of the first improvisation ensembles including Ennio Morricone — he combined serial technique with graphic scores and free improvisation. He eventually abandoned composition to focus on writing and teaching, making his small output particularly precious. His work bridged European avant-garde traditions with Italian cultural contexts.

Alternative TV is a British post-punk and experimental band formed in London in 1977 by Mark Perry — founding editor of the influential punk fanzine Sniffin' Glue (1976) — and Alex Fergusson. Their debut album The Image Has Cracked (1978) blended punk and dub, while Vibing Up the Senile Man Part One (1979) moved into avant-garde and experimental territory. Perry reformed the band in 1985 and has continued intermittently since, with later albums including Punk Life (1998), Apollo (1999), and Opposing Forces (2015). The group is considered a pioneer of post-punk and early DIY culture.

Andy Calorie is a noise musician whose work occupies the harsher end of experimental and power electronics. Operating largely outside mainstream documentation, Calorie has released a small but focused body of material catalogued on Discogs alongside occasional remix appearances. The work sits within traditions of harsh noise and extreme sound art, defined more by physicality and intensity than by conventional compositional structure. Releases have appeared in limited editions consistent with underground noise culture, where scarcity and directness of distribution are part of the practice.

Jan Bruyndonckx is a Belgian sound artist and musician working with electronics and improvisation in experimental music contexts. His practice engages with the sonic possibilities of electronic instruments and the relationships between sound production, performance, and listening. Active in the Belgian experimental music scene, he has contributed to festivals and events dedicated to experimental and electroacoustic practice. His work reflects sustained attention to the material dimensions of sound and the ways in which specific sonic situations create distinctive experiences of time and space.

El Urda is the stage name of Andrés Urda, a content creator from Sincelejo, on the Colombian Caribbean coast. Active across YouTube and Instagram, where his audience has grown to exceed one million followers, he built his following through prank videos and public social experiments staged in everyday urban spaces. His work frequently deploys sound — unexpected noise, music, or amplified disruption — as the central trigger for public reaction, turning ordinary shared environments into sites of spontaneous social commentary on everyday behaviour and collective expectation.

Nestor Figueras is a field recordist and researcher whose work focuses on the music and sound practices of Indigenous peoples of South America, notably the Yanomami of Venezuela and Brazil. His recordings document the chant traditions, ceremonial music, and sonic environments of communities that have received little ethnographic documentation, preserving material of significant cultural and acoustic importance. His work has been associated with David Toop, whose writing and curation of Amazonian and forest musics brought these sonic traditions into broader experimental music discourse, and whose anthology work on Amerindian music drew on similar field recording practices.

François Bayle (born 1932) is a French composer of acousmatic and musique concrète who directed the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in Paris from 1966 to 1997. A student of Messiaen and Stockhausen, he became the principal theorist of acousmatic music — music heard without visible source — developing the concept of the i-son (imaginary sound) as the central figure of electroacoustic composition. He designed and named the Acousmonium, the orchestra of loudspeakers used for spatial diffusion. His output includes the landmark Expérience Acoustique (1969–70), and his theoretical legacy shapes the GRM aesthetic to this day.

A violist and experimental musician based in Mexico City, Alexander Bruck performs with Liminar and Generación Espontánea, two of the most significant contemporary music ensembles in Mexico. He teaches viola and new music at the Escuela Superior de Música/CENART and has a particular focus on microtonal music — compositions employing intervals smaller than the Western semitone. He also works as a bookseller at Siranda, where he co-programmes concerts of improvised music alongside Bacal/Colaboratorio Sonoro. His practice moves between contemporary concert music, free jazz, noise, and sound art.

Researcher, curator, and writer based between Berlin and Copenhagen, she holds a PhD in social anthropology from Bern University and is a PhD fellow at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen, affiliated with its Sound Studies Lab. Her research centres on sound art and experimental music in late Soviet underground cultures and contemporary practices across Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Baltics. She has worked with the Venice Biennale, Mondrian Foundation, and Lisson Gallery, and has published extensively on sonic politics and anti-fascist music practices.

Born in 1990 in Paris, García has worked between noise and improvised music since 2015 using a guitar, a pedal, and an amp. An electromagnetic pickup held in her right hand moves across the body and strings, producing growls, squeaks, and moans that push the instrument toward abstraction. Her album Bye Bye Bird, released on Ideologic Organ in February 2025, is her first record under her own name. She has performed with Fred Frith, Stephen O'Malley, and Leïla Bordreuil, plays in the improvisation ensemble Le Un, and forms the duo Autoreverse with Arnaud Rivière.

Martin Kuentz is a German artist born in 1975, based in Berlin. In 2002, he founded the Salon Bruit, a concert series on improvised, electroacoustic, and noise music. He organized the DIENSTbar event on M.S. Stubnitz (Rotterdam) in 2001, and took part in the “White Ears” exhibition of Expo 3000 (Lagos Art Festival). He has participated in several music-related projects, including radio transmitting performances as Transmitting Object Behaviour (T.O.B.), Berlin free radio campaign, Blind Operators, Unkuentz vs. Trodza. Kuentz founded ‘apostrov recordings and he does several workshops for DIY micro-fm-circuits and DIY sound-modules in Europe.

Víctor Nubla (b. 1953) is a Spanish musician and sound artist based in Barcelona, best known as a founding member of Macromassa — an experimental group formed in the early 1980s that became one of the most significant projects in Spanish avant-garde music. Macromassa developed a practice using prepared instruments, found objects, electroacoustics, and performance to produce work that engaged with the Spanish industrial and experimental underground.

Nubla's work with Macromassa spans recordings, installations, and performances that connect to European traditions of noise, electroacoustic music, and conceptual performance while maintaining a distinctly Spanish sensibility.

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone is the solo project of American musician Owen Ashworth, working from Chicago and later San Francisco. From the late 1990s through to 2010, he released a series of lo-fi, intimately autobiographical albums built from cheap Casio keyboards, drum machines, and understated vocals. Records including Answering Machine Music (2000), Tomahawk Dynamite (2003), and Vs. Children (2009) documented small, specific scenes of loneliness and urban life with deadpan emotional precision. He subsequently began recording as Advance Base, continuing a similar practice of minimal confessional songwriting.

Born in Barcelona in 1979 and based in Amsterdam, Patiño works with sound synthesis, algorithmic composition, and audiovisual installation, focusing on the sculptural properties of synthetic sound across concert, performance, and installation formats. He has published releases on labels including Anòmia, Alku, and Free Software Series, and has collaborated with Roc Jiménez de Cisneros on Super-boredom. Since 2013 he has co-led N.M.O. alongside percussionist Morten J. Olsen, a project they describe as Military Danceable Space Music and Fluxus Techno, operating in a hybrid territory between club music, performance art, and inventive approaches to sound spatialization.

Alva Noto is the alias of Carsten Nicolai, a German artist and musician born in 1965 in Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz). He co-founded the Raster-Noton label with Olaf Bender and Frank Bretschneider in 1996, a central platform for minimal and digital electronic music. His recordings explore the intersection of sound and image through click tones, data-derived structures, and micro-processed noise. Key collaborations include ongoing work with Ryuichi Sakamoto and with Olaf Bender as Senking. He represents Germany at major international exhibitions and maintains a sustained institutional presence across art and music contexts.

Working under the Evapori name since the early 2000s, Oliver Peters is an experimental composer living and working north of Hamburg. His music blurs distinctions between musique concrète, sound poetry, and contemporary classical composition, with pieces built from field recordings, transformed found materials, and acoustic instruments including piano and cello. Releases have appeared on Entr'acte, Walter Ulbricht Schallfolien, and 1000füssler, as well as on the Antiinformation imprint he co-ran with Nicolas Wiese. His 2014 album Dia-Logos, released on Fragment Factory, extended his practice into a dialogue with other composers and musicians.

Erwin Wurm (b. 1954) is an Austrian artist best known for his One-Minute Sculptures — works in which participants assume absurd temporary positions with everyday objects, becoming sculptures for one minute. Initiated in the early 1990s, this project has been developed in public and institutional contexts worldwide, challenging assumptions about the body, duration, authorship, and the definition of sculpture. The works function as instruction-based pieces that democratise the production of art while producing images of profound strangeness and comedy. His Fat series — bloated versions of cars, houses, and household objects — extends his critique of consumer excess into three dimensions.

Teté Leguía (born 1985, Lima) is a Peruvian prepared electric bassist based in New Haven. Trained in composition at the National Conservatory of Peru, she deconstructs conventional bass technique using feedback, magnetic field disruption, and found objects — no effects pedals, no overdubs. She ran the twice-monthly free improvisation series "Minutos para el fin" in Lima before relocating to the USA, where she became a fixture of the New York and New Haven free improv scene. She has recorded on Buh Records, ugEXPLODE, and fim improvisation, and collaborates regularly with Martín Escalante, Weasel Walter, and Jacob Felix Heule.

Anne Hilde Neset is a Norwegian music journalist, editor, and broadcaster who has been one of the most influential voices in writing about experimental and contemporary music for over two decades. She is best known for her long tenure at The Wire, the UK magazine dedicated to adventurous music, where she served as deputy editor and editor-in-chief.

Under her editorial direction, The Wire maintained and extended its commitment to covering experimental, improvised, and underground music in depth, providing a critical context for work that receives little coverage elsewhere.

NHK'Koyxen (also known as NHK or NHK yx Koyxen) is the primary project of Kouhei Matsunaga, a Japanese electronic musician born in 1976, based in Berlin. His work combines sparse, heavily processed club rhythms, broken beat structures and acid-adjacent electronics with a distinctly subtractive, minimal aesthetic — music that feels simultaneously recognisable and alien, situated within club culture while dismantling its conventions from the inside.

He has released extensively on PAN, Editions Mego, Important Records and his own imprint, building a substantial catalogue that traces an evolving engagement with the limits of electronic music production.

Luke Slater is a British techno producer and DJ, active since the late 1980s and among the most rigorous figures in European underground techno. Recording under his own name and under aliases including Planetary Assault Systems and The 7th Plain, he has produced a body of work that explores the full formal range of techno — from deep atmospheric compositions to brutal industrial-influenced dance floor music. His Planetary Assault Systems alias is associated with a dark, high-energy techno that has been influential on the development of the contemporary Berlin techno scene. He founded the Mote-Evolver label as a platform for his own releases and for collaborators working in a similar vein.

Atsuhiro Ito is a Japanese artist and musician best known for the optron — a modified fluorescent tube that he plays as a musical instrument, generating harsh, buzzing electronic drones and flickering light. The instrument works by manipulating the electrical current through the fluorescent tube, producing sounds that range from low hums to intense electronic noise, while simultaneously creating unpredictable visual effects through the light's response to the same electrical interventions.

Based in Japan, Ito has performed extensively with the optron in solo concerts and collaborative settings, becoming one of the most distinctive performers in the Japanese experimental music scene.

Sound artist and composer Fedde ten Berge (b. 1983) is based near the Dutch coast in Heiloo and works with interactive installation, electronics, and custom-built performance instruments. He designed the Pentacle, a mobile 15.3 surround sound loudspeaker system that has toured extensively across Europe and been used by numerous international artists. His ongoing series Of Nature and Things investigates the vibrational and electrical properties of ceramic materials through sound installation. He formerly served as artistic coordinator at the renowned STEIM in Amsterdam, a key institution in the development of electronic and computer-based arts.

Born in 1975 in Esbjerg, Denmark, he studied at the Academy for Media Arts in Cologne and has spent decades exploring resonance, hearing, and acoustic phenomena that ordinarily remain imperceptible. His most celebrated work, 4 Rooms, was recorded inside four abandoned buildings within Chernobyl's exclusion zone in 2005 and released on Touch Records on the twentieth anniversary of the disaster. By playing back ambient sound into each space and re-recording it repeatedly, he built dynamic drones from silence itself. His installations and performances have been presented at MoMA New York, the Menil Collection, and the Mori Art Museum Tokyo.

Yasushi Utsunomiya is a Japanese musician, producer, instrument developer, and sound theorist whose work traverses experimental music, recording practice, and acoustic research since the late 1970s. He has collaborated with artists including After Dinner, Shonen Knife, JON & Utsunomiya, and Tenniscoats, developing innovative recording systems integrating technology into musical expression. Utsunomiya investigates the theoretical foundations of music, treating sound as continuous exploration. Through recordings, improvisation, and technical innovations, he is recognized as one of Japan’s most distinctive sonic thinkers, pursuing what he describes as the search for an ultimate form of music.

Robert Henke (b. 1969, Munich) is a German musician, artist, and software developer who co-created Ableton Live — the digital audio workstation that has become one of the most widely used tools in contemporary music production and live performance. His role in developing Ableton has shaped the infrastructure of electronic music in ways that few individual contributions can match.

As Monolake, his artistic alias, Henke has produced a defining body of minimal electronic and spatial work since the 1990s, releasing on labels including Chain Reaction (where he was among the core artists alongside Basic Channel and Maurizio), Imbalance Computer Music, and his own Monolake Records.

Klára Hosnedlová (b. 1990) is a Czech visual artist based in Prague whose work centres on immersive interior environments combining hand embroidery, textile, photography, and sculpture to construct detailed social atmospheres. Her large-scale installations transform gallery spaces into environments evoking domestic and public interiors — salons, reception rooms, lobbies — decorated through the labour-intensive application of embroidery to walls, furniture, and surfaces. This practice raises questions about femininity, craft labour, decoration, and the social dimensions of interior space, situating traditionally female processes within major contemporary institutions.

Born on 18 May 1946, he was one of the founding members of Wire, the English post-punk band whose three albums Pink Flag, Chairs Missing, and 154 were released between 1976 and 1979. Alongside his band work he formed collaborative projects with Wire bassist Graham Lewis, including Dome and Duet Emmo, and in the 1980s and 1990s produced music for dance and film commissions by choreographers including Michael Clark. He left Wire in 2004 and has continued as a solo artist, with albums including Ab Ovo and Oblivio Agitatum, working in industrial texture and rhythm.

Vía Láctea was a band from the 1970s Mexican underground that could be contextualized as cosmic music. It was led by Carlos Alvarado and Miguel Angel Nava. The music featured classic synthesizer excursions strongly influenced by Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, more discreet and quiet, restrained and Ambient-like, with sometimes Ethnic / Prehispanic influences. After the first album, Miguel Angel Nava left the band, leaving Alvarado as the sole member. He continued to release albums, sometimes helped by fellow experimentalists Jorge Reyes, Arturo Meza, and others.

Leif Elggren is a Swedish artist born in 1950 who lives and works in Stockholm.

Active since the late 1970s, Leif Elggren has become one of the most consistently surprising conceptual artists to work in the combined worlds of audio and visual. A writer, visual artist, stage performer, and composer, he has many albums to his credit, solo and with the Sons of God, on labels such as Ash International, Touch, Radium, and his own Firework Edition.

His wide-ranging and prolific body of art often involves dreams and subtle absurdities, social hierarchies turned upside-down, hidden actions and events taking on the quality of icons.

Eliana Glass is a singer, pianist, and visual artist born in 1997 in Australia and raised in Seattle, based in New York. A graduate of the jazz program at The New School — where she studied with Andrew Cyrille, Ben Street, Kris Davis, and Jay Clayton — her practice combines vocal jazz with an avant-garde sensibility, engaging with the work of Carla Bley and Annette Peacock alongside original compositions. Her debut album E, released via Shelter Press in April 2025, was recorded using vintage 1960s recording equipment.

Based in Japan, he is a sound artist and curator at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM). He studied at the International Academy of Media-Arts and Sciences in Gifu and holds a degree from Tama Art University. His practice centres on sound objects and experimental installation, and he has participated in projects directed by Otomo Yoshihide at YCAM, including the without records workshop series. He performs in the duo Shojiki with Muku Kobayashi and works across improvised performance, sound installation, and technical direction for live multimedia events.

Born in Seoul in 1977, this South Korean sound artist began playing in experimental contexts in 1996 and co-founded the noise duo Astronoise with Hong Chulki in 1997. His practice centers on playback devices — CD players, tape machines, VCRs — treated as instruments, exploring the failure and control of reproduction through improvisation and composition. In 2003 he and Chulki co-founded Balloon and Needle, an influential label documenting the Korean experimental and improvised music scene. He has performed internationally in contexts ranging from EAI to free improvisation.

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007) was a German composer whose pioneering work in electronic, spatial, and serial music made him the most influential and consequential music innovator of the twentieth century. Born near Cologne, he studied in Cologne and Paris before beginning his career at the WDR electronic music studio in Cologne, where he produced works including Gesang der Jünglinge (1956) — widely regarded as the first major work of electronic music — and Kontakte (1960).

His development of serial composition extended to parameters beyond pitch, applying serial organization to dynamics, duration, and timbre.

Sound artist and researcher based in New York, where she holds a professorship in the Department of Art at Stony Brook University. Her practice spans sound installation, performance, acoustic ecology, and social soundscape studies, with recurring concerns around climate, gender, and technology in music. She founded Women in Sound Women on Sound (WISWOS), an international advocacy network for women in the sonic arts, and served as Editor-in-Chief of Interference: A Journal of Audio Culture from 2012 to 2022. She co-edited the volume The Body in Sound, Music and Performance, bringing together research by women working in contemporary sound practice.

Nate Wooley (b. 1974) is an American trumpet player and composer working within free jazz, electroacoustic improvisation, and contemporary composition. Classically trained yet steeped in free jazz, he has developed an approach to the trumpet that extends its range through extreme dynamics, multiphonics, and extended techniques combined with electronics. He is known for solo performances of extraordinary concentration, as well as ensemble work with artists including Anthony Braxton and Mary Halvorson. His ongoing Seven Storey Mountain — a cycle for large ensemble named after Thomas Merton's memoir — has grown into a sprawling meditation on drone, density, and collective ecstatic release.

Born in Düsseldorf in 1937 and died in Berlin in 2011, this German electronic musician studied sculpture with Joseph Beuys and composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen. He co-founded the Zodiak Free Arts Lab in West Berlin in 1968 and was an early member of Tangerine Dream before co-founding Kluster with Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius in 1969. After leaving Kluster he pursued a relentless solo practice of tape manipulation and raw electronics, beginning with the album Rot in 1973, producing hundreds of cassettes, vinyl releases, and CD-Rs until his death.

Gaahl (born Kristian Espedal in 1975 in Espedalen, Norway) is a Norwegian vocalist and artist best known for his work in the black metal band Gorgoroth, which he joined in the mid-1990s and with which he became one of the most recognizable and controversial figures in Norwegian black metal. His confrontational stage presence, austere philosophical statements, and association with extreme imagery defined a particular strand of theatrical black metal performance.

His time with Gorgoroth was marked by significant controversy, including a lengthy legal battle over the ownership of the band name, as well as criminal charges that became part of the mythology surrounding him.

Limpwrist is an American queer hardcore band led by vocalist Martin Sorrondeguy, who is also the lead singer of Los Crudos, the influential Latino hardcore band. Formed in the late 1990s and active intermittently since, Limpwrist combines the ferocious energy of hardcore punk with explicitly queer politics — confrontational, out, and refusing any accommodation with homophobia within or outside the hardcore scene.

Their music is fast, direct, and politically serious, addressing queer experience with the same raw intensity that hardcore punk brings to other political concerns.

William Basinski is an American composer born in 1958 in Houston, Texas. Working primarily with tape loops and analogue decay, he developed a practice of recording material onto magnetic tape and allowing the medium itself to disintegrate during playback — a process documented in the Disintegration Loops (2002), recorded as the tapes deteriorated on 11 September 2001, with the resulting footage of the burning Twin Towers inseparable from the release. His work explores memory, entropy, and time across albums on 2062 and other labels, and he lives and works in Los Angeles.

Ralf Wehowsky (often credited as RLW) is a German composer and sound artist born in 1959. A founding member and key creative figure of the seminal post-industrial group P16.D4 — active from 1980 to 1987 and released on the Selektion label — Wehowsky has subsequently produced an extensive solo catalogue of extremely detailed, micro-edited tape and computer compositions.

His compositional method often involves inviting multiple collaborators to contribute raw source material — field recordings, instrumental fragments, electronic sound — which he then processes, layers, edits and restructures into highly worked compositions that bear little resemblance to their origins.

Four Tet is the alias of Kieran Hebden (born 1977), a London-based producer and DJ. Beginning on Domino Records in the late 1990s with records including Rounds (2003) and Everything Ecstatic (2005), Hebden developed a style of textured, sample-based electronica drawing on jazz, folk, and electronic sources into intricate, warmly organic compositions. Over time his practice expanded toward longer, more hypnotic dance music, releases on Text Records, and prolific DJ activity that connects his work to contemporary club culture without abandoning the intimacy of his earlier records. He has collaborated extensively with Flying Lotus, Burial, Actress, and others.

Carmen Villain (b. 1983) is a Norwegian artist and musician born in Oslo to a Mexican father and Norwegian mother, whose work crosses photography, film, and electronic music. Her musical practice — developed across albums including Infinite Avenue (2017) and Both (2020) on the Smalltown Supersound label — draws on jazz harmony, ambient music, and free improvisation to produce compositions of unusual atmospheric depth, often incorporating voice, saxophone, and synthesiser in ways that are simultaneously spare and evocative. Her background in photography and visual art informs the spatial and imagistic quality of her sonic work, which tends to construct environments rather than narratives.

Born in Mexico City in 1979 and based in Berlin since 2008, Mario de Vega is a sound artist and Professor for Sound at Kunsthochschule Kassel whose practice spans site-specific interventions, psychoacoustics, and performative situations pushing the limits of audible perception. MNNN is his DJ alias, taken to venues including Berghain in Berlin, 20Alpha in Hong Kong, LUFF in Lausanne, and the Sanatorium of Sound in Sokołowsko. Rooted in experimental music and conceptual art, his DJ work extends a practice built on unstable systems, extreme frequencies, and the indeterminate edges of listening.

José Maceda (1917–2004) was a Filipino composer and ethnomusicologist who developed one of the most distinctive compositional voices of 20th-century Asian music. Trained as a concert pianist in Europe and the United States, he returned to the Philippines in the 1950s to conduct ethnomusicological fieldwork on Southeast Asian music traditions, particularly the drone-based gong music of Mindanao. His compositions from the 1960s onward — including Ugnayan (1974), which used 68 transistor radios transmitting simultaneously across Manila — integrated field recordings, mass participation, and slow temporal processes into large-scale, site-specific works.

Born in 1937 in rural Boone County, West Virginia, Adkins taught himself to play guitar and drums simultaneously after misunderstanding a Hank Williams record and concluding that one musician must be playing every part. Working in near-total isolation in a tarpaper shack, he recorded thousands of songs — by his own estimate over 7,000 — direct to reel-to-reel tape, covering rockabilly, boogie, and surreal narratives about decapitation and hot dogs. He remained unknown until the 1980s when the Cramps covered his song She Said and Norton Records released the compilation Out to Hunch in 1986. He is cited as a key precursor to psychobilly. He died in 2005 following an ATV accident.

Born in Brighton in 1969, he studied music theory and composition at the University of Manchester and tuba at the Royal Northern College of Music, graduating in 1991. Based in Berlin since 1998, he has pioneered radical innovations in brass instrument technique, discovering the noise valve in 1996 and developing the first fully microtonal tuba in 2009. In 2012 he invented the Hayward Tuning Vine, a tool for representing the overtone space of the microtonal tuba. He founded the ensemble Zinc & Copper in 2005 and has collaborated with composers including Christian Wolff, Alvin Lucier, and Eliane Radigue.

Chuquimamani-Condori, working as DJ E, is an artist and DJ working in experimental club music and global electronic sound, whose productions resist easy genre categorisation by combining techno, noise, cumbia, dembow, and electronic music from a range of regional traditions. Their work moves between underground club culture and experimental practice, finding in the latter a conceptual framework for the formal innovations implicit in the former. Of Aymara descent, they draw on traditions including huayno and tarqueada alongside dancefloor forms, treating production as a space of cultural continuity.

Klaus Röder is a German musician working with violin, guitar, and electronics in experimental and improvised music contexts. Active in the German experimental music scene since the 1980s, he has contributed to numerous collaborative projects and has released recordings on specialist labels. His work explores the extended possibilities of his instruments through improvisation and electroacoustic approaches. He has been associated with the Musica Improvvisa and the broader European free improvisation community, participating in an ongoing investigation of the violin and guitar as sources of unconventional sonic material.

Doon Kanda is the musical alias of Jesse Kanda, a visual artist and producer born 1987, who grew up between Japan and Canada before settling in London. He began sharing work via DeviantArt, where he met Arca as a teenager. Under the Doon Kanda name he produces hazy, disorienting experimental electronic music channeling themes of growth, decay, the body, and the subconscious through fractured club-adjacent sound design. His debut album Labyrinth appeared in 2020 on Hyperdub. Kanda is also recognised as a visual collaborator, having created photography and visual identities for Arca, Björk, and FKA Twigs. His sleeve for FKA Twigs' LP1 earned a Grammy nomination for Best Recording Package.

Born in Luleå, Sweden in 1981, Marja Ahti is a Swedish-Finnish sound artist based in Turku, Finland. Working with field recordings, analog synthesis — including Buchla and ARP synthesizers — electronic feedback, and acoustic instrumentation, she builds electroacoustic environments that approach sound as both form and poetic medium. Her debut LP Vegetal Negatives (Hallow Ground, 2019) drew on recordings made in Greece, Alaska, Finland and Sweden; The Current Inside (Hallow Ground, 2020) followed, alongside Still Lives (Students of Decay, 2021). She also works as the duo Ahti & Ahti with Niko-Matti Ahti.

Born in Nice in 1961 and based in Sète, this French artist and composer spent a decade composing for Pascal Rambert's theater company before developing his practice of generating sound from living systems and everyday objects. The installation From Here to Ear (1999) used zebra finches moving freely among electric guitars and amplifiers to produce unscripted compositions. His clinamen series, begun in 1997, floats white porcelain bowls across pools of water to create resonant, chiming environments. His work has been exhibited at the Bourse de Commerce and the Venice Biennale.

Stephan von Huene (1932–2000) was an American-born artist and sculptor based in Germany who created kinetic and sound sculptures — mechanical instruments and automata that produce rhythmic, polyrhythmic, and quasi-musical sounds autonomously. His work includes Totem Poles, a series of sculptural columns equipped with reed organs, and Schreibmaschinen, typing machines that perform rhythmic textural works. Exhibited at major institutions internationally, von Huene occupies an important position in the history of kinetic art, sound art, and machine music, his works presaging later investigations into robotic and algorithmic sound generation.

Known as the Cloudsmith for his lifelong devotion to sky imagery, this New Hampshire-born Fluxus artist (1931–2018) began his sky series in 1965 on Cape Breton Island, painting clouds on found work boots, and continued transferring sky imagery to objects, vehicles, and textiles throughout a fifty-year practice. He taught at Rutgers University from 1956 to 2003 and was instrumental in staging early Fluxus events there, including a Flux-Mass with George Maciunas and a 1970 performance by Hermann Nitsch. His political and ecological activism remained inseparable from his art until his death.

Born in Styria in 1983, this Vienna-based composer and sound artist works across studio production, live performance, film scores, theatre, and radio, with a particular focus on field recording under extreme physical conditions—capturing desert sand movement or contracting salt crystals. A founding member of the electronics ensemble Ventil and co-founder of Ventil Records, he also performs in the duo Kutin|Kindlinger. His kinetic sound sculpture TORSO #1, in which four speakers mounted on rotors create shifting acoustic fields, won the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica in 2019.

Thomas Grill is an Austrian sound artist and researcher based in Vienna. His practice spans composition, performance, software development, and theoretical writing, with a particular focus on the intersection of computational processes and acoustic phenomena. He teaches at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and has been a leading figure in Vienna's experimental electronic music scene.

Grill is a founder and longstanding member of the artistic collective and label MOSZ, through which he has collaborated with and supported a wide range of Austrian and international experimental artists.

Born in Tarbes, France in 1984, Émilie Mouchous lives and works in Montreal, where she has presented programming at CKUT Radio since 2008. She holds a master's degree in electroacoustic composition from the Université de Montréal and builds her own electronics, working primarily through no-input technique and what she terms mouth feedback. Her practice encompasses free improvisation, sound installation, radiophonic work, and web art, often incorporating absurdist everyday objects. She is a member of the trio Dead Squirrels and the collective Kohlenstoff Records, and her work has received awards in Canada and internationally.

Francis Dhomont (1926–2023) was a French-Canadian composer of acousmatic and electroacoustic music. After early work in France as a student of Nadia Boulanger, he moved to Québec in 1978, where he became a central figure of the Montreal electroacoustic scene. His large-scale acousmatic works — including Sous le regard d'un soleil noir (1981) and Forêt profonde (1994–96) — are characterised by elaborate spatial architectures and a concern with inner, psychological landscapes. A recipient of the Qwartz and Prix Ars Electronica, he contributed as both composer and theorist to the development of acousmatic music through his years teaching at the Université de Montréal.

Harry Smith (1923–1991) was an American filmmaker, artist, occultist, and music archivist whose Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), compiled from his private collection of 1920s–30s commercial recordings and released on Folkways, became one of the most influential documents in American music history. The Anthology — 84 tracks of blues, ballads, country, and sacred music — provided the foundational vocabulary for the 1960s folk revival. Smith was also a painter of abstract films, an anthropologist of string figures, and an obsessive collector. He is a figure at the intersection of American avant-garde art, mysticism, and vernacular music.

Murderer is an extreme noise and industrial project operating within the underground tape and harsh-noise circuit, where anonymous acts often trade under blunt, confrontational names. Typical of this milieu, the project favours short-run cassette and digital releases distributed through Bandcamp and small DIY labels rather than conventional promotion.

Its sound sits within the lineage of power electronics and death industrial, drawing on heavily processed feedback, distorted vocals and repetitive, abrasive structures associated with that tradition. Such projects typically circulate in small print runs traded directly among noise collectors rather than through conventional channels.

Born in 1962 in Rameh, she is a Palestinian vocalist, oud and qanun player whose career began with the political folk group Sabreen, which she joined in 1982 and with whom she recorded four albums over two decades. In 2002 she moved to Europe and established a solo practice, performing original compositions alongside classical Arabic repertoire across the Middle East and Europe. She has collaborated with Swiss composer Werner Hassler on electronic music and with French bassist Sarah Murcia. In 2014 she founded the nonprofit Zamkana to support independent artistic projects. She was a 2025 Aga Khan Music Awards finalist.

Efdemin is the alias of Phillip Sollmann, a German DJ and producer born in 1974 in Kassel and based in Berlin, whose idiosyncratic minimal techno draws on dub, deep house, and Detroit techno to produce music of considerable depth and psychedelic intensity. He moved to Berlin in 2005 and quickly became a resident DJ at Berghain, one of the city's most influential clubs. His releases include the debut EP Kleine Wirrniss (Dial, 2004), Chicago (2010), Decay (2012), and New Atlantis (2018). As Phillip Sollmann he also works in experimental contexts, including Monophonie, a microtonal piece for Ensemble Musikfabrik built around Harry Partch's instruments, premiered at Berlin's Volksbühne in 2017.

Born in Surbiton, England in 1971, Jeffery took up the trombone at eleven and built a practice he describes as desert trombonism, rooted in a formative journey to the Sahara in 1990. He studied at Dartington College of Arts, the University of York, and the Royal Conservatory of The Hague under James Fulkerson, and developed the tromboscillator — trombone amplified and transformed through live electronics. His work spans free improvisation, contemporary classical, rock, and Indian classical traditions; from 2013 he studied Dhrupad with Amelia Cuni. He is a member of the ensemble Zeitkratzer and the Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble, and is based in Berlin.

A Berlin-based musician holding PhDs in electroacoustic composition from the University of Manchester and in sociology from the London School of Economics, he moved from free improvisation on saxophone to intensive work with modular synthesis. He befriended Dutch synthesizer designer Rob Hordijk and developed a deep focus on the Blippoo Box. In 2011 he co-founded Basic Electricity, one of the first regular modular synthesizer concert series in the world. He also instigated the Sines and Square festival in Manchester and works as a mastering engineer for experimental and electroacoustic music.

Producer and cultural organizer, co-founder of Pointless Geometry in 2015 alongside Darek Pietraszewski, a Polish independent label releasing experimental, electroacoustic, and electronic music primarily on cassette and VHS. Rooted in a philosophy background, her earlier work centred on Warsaw's independent music and cassette scene, where she helped organise events through initiatives including Impro Mitingiem and Trzecia Fala. She was part of the Studio Sokołowsko team at the In Situ Foundation, the contemporary art foundation that hosts the Sanatorium of Sound festival. Currently, she presents a mixtape show called w_głowie on Radio Kapitał and works on her master's thesis on psychology.

Knud Viktor (1924–2017) was a Danish-French sound artist based in Provence whose field recordings — particularly of insects, birds, and the acoustic ecology of his surrounding landscape — produced one of the most extensive and technically innovative archives of natural sound. Working with homemade recording equipment from the 1960s, he created recordings of extraordinary intimacy, capturing the sounds of individual insects in minute detail. His work is among the most significant in the history of natural sound recording, anticipating acoustic ecology by decades.

Alexandra Cárdenas is a Colombian composer and live coder based in Berlin. Originally trained in classical composition, she became one of the leading practitioners of live coding with TidalCycles — the pattern language developed by Alex McLean — using it to generate algorithmic music in real time at the intersection of club culture and contemporary composition.

Her work addresses the acoustic and social dimensions of electronic music, often connecting club and concert settings through a practice that is transparent about its computational means.

Günter Müller (born 1954) is a Swiss percussionist and electronic musician. Beginning as a jazz drummer, he developed through the 1980s toward free improvisation and electroacoustic music, eventually abandoning conventional drumming in favour of electronics, iPods, and small custom instruments played with extreme subtlety. He has collaborated extensively with Toshimaru Nakamura, Voice Crack, and numerous international improvisers, releasing on For 4 Ears, Hathut, and other labels. His practice is defined by an exceptional economy of means — maximum information and nuance from minimal gesture — and he is among the most respected figures in the European electroacoustic improvisation scene.

Ataraw Mochizuki is a Tokyo-based musician active in noise and experimental music. He is a member of Groundcover, an experimental noise punk band formed in Tokyo in 1998 alongside Sara Nagakawa and Taisuke Endo, and also performs in Dubideb, a techno-industrial noise duo. He manages the music venue 20000V in Higashi Koenji, Tokyo, which hosts underground experimental and noise performances. His work operates in the underground networks that connect Tokyo's experimental scene to the broader international community of noise and improvised music.

Professor of sound at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. Her practice and writing approach sonic experience through phenomenological and political frames. Her 2010 book Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art engaged works by Janet Cardiff, Bill Fontana, Bernard Parmegiani, and Merzbow alongside lesser-known contemporaries, establishing an aesthetics built on the act of listening itself. She draws on the relational logic of sound to examine the liminal spaces where disciplines converge around contemporary questions.

Katalin Ladik (b. 1942, Novi Sad) is a Yugoslav-Hungarian poet, performance artist, and musician who developed a radical sound poetry practice from the late 1960s. Her vocal performances — extended vocal technique, phonetic fragmentation, and physical presence — place her among the most significant European sound poets. She worked in the context of Yugoslav Fluxus and conceptual art and has been presented internationally in contexts ranging from sound poetry festivals to major art institutions. Her work has received renewed international attention through retrospective exhibitions and recent documentation projects.

Born in Stuttgart in 1939, Geerken studied oriental studies, philosophy, and comparative religion in Tübingen and Istanbul before joining the Goethe-Institut, which posted him to Cairo (1966–72), Kabul (1972–79), and Athens (1979–83). His years in Egypt were musically formative: he brought the Sun Ra Arkestra to Cairo in 1971 and co-founded the Cairo Free Jazz Ensemble. A percussionist as well as flutist, he collaborated over decades with Sun Ra, John Tchicai, and Sainkho Namtchylak. He was also a practitioner of concrete and visual poetry and organised the annual Bielefeld New Poetry Colloquium. He died in October 2021.

Electronic producer from Maharashtra State in western India who has developed and popularised an electronically adapted form of Dhol Tasha percussion music. The Dhol Tasha tradition—originally performed on acoustic kettle drums by community ensembles—was formalised as a distinct ceremonial percussion style by the late Shri Appasaheb Pendse in the 1960s. DJ Smiley Bobby's album Dhol Tasha Drum Exercises from Maharashtra, released on Nyege Nyege Tapes in April 2023, presents nearly an hour of up-to-the-second electronic reinterpretations of this tradition alongside peers including DJ Aasif, DJ Ammy, and DJ TSR, connecting Maharashtrian ceremonial sound to contemporary dancefloor culture.

Black Dice are an American noise and electronic group formed in Providence, Rhode Island in 1997. Beginning as a hardcore-influenced noise band, they radically transformed their practice after moving to Brooklyn — releasing on DFA Records and Paw Tracks a series of albums that combined noise, tropical found sounds, lo-fi electronics, and primitive drum machines into something genuinely novel. Beaches and Canyons (2002) and Broken Ear Record (2005) are landmarks of American experimental music of the 2000s. Their work occupied an unusual position between underground rock and experimental electronic music, attracting critical attention across both worlds.

Thongthai Thin-Isan is a musician from the Isan region of northeastern Thailand, a culturally distinct area with a Lao-influenced musical tradition that differs significantly from central Thai classical music. Isan music is built around the khaen — a free-reed mouth organ of bamboo pipes — alongside plucked lutes, percussion, and the mor lam vocal tradition. Thin-Isan may refer to the geographic or stylistic designation of this musical practice, indicating music of the regional tradition as distinct from Bangkok-centred popular or classical styles. Such recordings have been documented on Sublime Frequencies and related labels.

Born in Guadalajara, Mexico in 1978, Marisol Jiménez holds a Master of Arts from Mills College and a doctorate in composition from Stanford University, where she studied with Brian Ferneyhough and Mark Applebaum. Now based in Berlin, her practice encompasses instrumental and electroacoustic composition, sound installation, and self-made instruments including large suspended springs she calls "noise spring harps," used in works such as Mesetas (2010) and Sensuous Matter (2018). She founded and directs the ARTSON Festival for Contemporary Music in Guadalajara and is a member of the Mexican Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte.

Jirus is a Bangkok-based DJ and electronic musician who came to electronic music through dub before expanding into deep house, techno, dub techno, and ambient music. He is a co-founder and musical director of Never Normal, a club and music space credited with revitalising Bangkok's underground nightlife, and has also joined More Rice, a record label and electronic music retailer in the city. His Youngjamena night brought him breakthrough recognition in the Southeast Asian underground, and he is a member of the MELA collective. He has performed at Beam, Glow, and Wonderfruit, building a reputation for sets that move through dark, deep, and bright sonic territories.

Born Austin Richard Post on 4 July 1995 in Syracuse, New York, and raised in Grapevine, Texas, he began writing music as a teenager and adopted his stage name from an internet rap name generator. His 2015 debut single White Iverson brought immediate online attention, and he signed to Republic Records later that year. His second album Beerbongs and Bentleys (2018) produced the Hot 100 number-one single Rockstar featuring 21 Savage. Subsequent albums Hollywood's Bleeding (2019) and F-1 Trillion (2024), a country record, both debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. The RIAA credits him with over 150 million certified US sales.

Mexican hybrid artist and composer born in 1974 who began as a percussionist and improviser before developing an expanded practice encompassing extended reality, 3D sound, interactive scores, and coded automatons. He has studied philosophy and video game design, and collaborated with neuroscience research groups, as well as performing with orchestras and ensembles in Madrid, London, Berlin, and Mexico City. In 2015 his music was launched into space. He won the Konzerthaus Berlin Interactive Composition competition as a VR artist in 2019 and received support from Mexico's National System of Art Creators (FONCA) from 2017 to 2020.

British artist born in 1972. Alice Kemp works across sound composition, performance, installation, drawing, and fetish-object making, with a practice grounded in trance states, dream-image language, and the thresholds between interior psychic experience and its material expression. She has performed internationally across Japan, the USA, and Europe, and has worked as an associate of the Schimpfluch-Gruppe. Her recordings have been released on Fragment Factory, Tochnit Aleph and Harbinger Sound, and her visual work has been shown at IONE and MANN gallery in London. She is based between Devon and London.

English musician, author, and curator born on 5 May 1949 in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, he entered London's improvisation scene in the early 1970s alongside Paul Burwell, Max Eastley, Steve Beresford, and others. His book Ocean of Sound (1995) reshaped understanding of ambient music and listening, while Haunted Weather (2004) mapped twenty-first-century developments in digital sound culture. A long-standing contributor to The Wire, he was also a member of The Flying Lizards. He is Emeritus Professor at the London College of Communication, and his critical writing and musical practice have consistently overlapped and informed each other.

Tomoko Sauvage is a Paris-based Japanese composer and artist best known for her original instrumentarium assembling water, ceramics, and electronics. She animates the inanimate through the careful tuning of water in ceramic bowls, making vessels vibrate and magnifying their tiny sounds — ordinarily inaudible — through hydrophone microphones, electronic processing, and close amplification.

Her work centers on the tactile materiality of vibrant objects, metaphorical listening, and the use of chance as a compositional method.

Ben Morea is an American anarchist artist who was a central figure in New York's radical underground in the 1960s and early 1970s. He co-founded Black Mask — a group producing confrontational street art attacking the commodification of culture — and helped form Up Against The Wall Motherfucker, a loosely organised affinity group that carried out direct actions in New York, including occupying Lincoln Center and distributing free food in Central Park. His practice drew on Situationist and Dada strategies, treating art and politics as inseparable. By decade's end, facing police attention, Morea withdrew into rural communes, later re-emerging to paint and discuss Black Mask's legacy.

Splitter Orchester is a Berlin-based large ensemble for improvised and composed music, founded in April 2010 by Clare Cooper, Clayton Thomas, and Gregor Hotz. Rooted in the city's Echtzeitmusik scene, the collective comprises around twenty musicians of ten nationalities, organised by direct-democratic principles with no conductor or central authority. Members simultaneously act as composers, performers, and improvisers, working the borderland between notation and improvisation using extended techniques across acoustic, electronic, and custom instruments. They have collaborated with George Lewis, Mathias Spahlinger, and Jean-Luc Guionnet, and released on Mikroton Recordings.

Nadine Byrne is a Swedish artist born in 1985 in Stockholm. Her practice moves between textile, sculpture, video, sound and performance, often drawing on occult imagery, ritual, folklore, medieval iconography and esoteric traditions as visual and conceptual source material. Her work treats these traditions not as exotic reference points but as living systems of knowledge and symbolism with which contemporary practice can engage on its own terms.

She has directed music videos for Anna von Hausswolff and collaborated extensively on visual material for Scandinavian experimental and heavy music.

Born in Miami in 1978 to Cuban and German parents, he grew up in the Little Havana neighbourhood absorbing Miami bass, death metal, and Afro-Cuban music before buying his first electronic equipment at seventeen. He began releasing music on the Miami IDM label Schematic in 2001 with his debut 8000 B.C., followed by Chopped Zombie Fungus and Global Speaker Fisting. His hyper-kinetic live performances, involving masks and props, have included tours with Skinny Puppy, and he is credited on two Skinny Puppy albums, The Greater Wrong of the Right and Mythmaker.

Laurie Spiegel is an American composer born in 1945. She has worked at Bell Laboratories in computer graphics and is known primarily for her electronic music compositions and her algorithmic composition software “Music Mouse”. She is also a guitarist, lutenist and has been inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

She worked with Buchla and Electronic Music Laboratories synthesizers and digital systems, including Bell Labs’ GROOVE system (1973–1978), the Bell Labs Digital Synthesizer (1977), the alphaSyntauri synthesizer system for the Apple II computer (1978–1981), and the McLeyvier (1981–1985).

Francisco López (b. 1964, Spain) trained as an entomologist before developing into one of the most prolific and uncompromising figures in sound art and musique concrète. His practice centres on immersive concerts in which audiences are blindfolded — a format he initiated in 1998 — and full-range loudspeakers are arranged around a concealed performer to dissolve the boundary between listener and environment. He has recorded across more than seventy countries, from Patagonian plateaus to tropical rainforests and industrial interiors, and has released hundreds of recordings. He holds four honorary mentions at the Ars Electronica and the Qwartz Award 2010 for best sound anthology.

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) was a French writer, actor, and theater theorist whose concept of the "Theatre of Cruelty" sought to overwhelm audiences with sound, light, and physical intensity rather than dialogue and plot. His 1938 essay collection The Theatre and Its Double became one of the most influential texts in twentieth-century performance theory.

Institutionalized for much of his later life, Artaud also produced radio work, drawings, and writings on language, the body, and madness that anticipated later experiments in sound poetry and performance art. His final radio piece, To Have Done with the Judgment of God, was banned from broadcast before its scheduled 1948 airing.

Jerusalem and Jaffa-based composer, improviser, and sound artist Eran Sachs came to electronics through an unusual path: trained classically, then introduced to signal theory during his service with the IDF Electronic Intelligence unit in the mid-1990s. He has played the no-input mixer since 1998, developing it as his primary instrument. He graduated from the Hebrew University in psychology and philosophy in 2005 and holds an MFA from Bard College. He co-curates Primate Arena, a nomadic platform for experimental music running since 2008, and has released work on Sub-Rosa and Mille Plateaux, collaborating with Oren Ambarchi, Thomas Köner, and Stephen O'Malley.

Florian Hecker is a German artist who works with synthetic sound, the listening process, and the audience's auditory experience, producing work that investigates the psychoacoustic and phenomenological dimensions of electronic sound. Based in Munich and working internationally, he has become one of the most rigorous and philosophically grounded figures in contemporary sound art.

His practice is deeply informed by his collaborations with philosopher Quentin Meillassoux and with theorist Robin Mackay, and he has worked closely with Reza Negarestani on conceptually demanding text-sound works. His releases on Editions Mego and Presto!?

Pierre Henry (1927–2017) was a French composer and founding figure of musique concrète. Working at the GRM with Pierre Schaeffer — with whom he composed the landmark Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950) — Henry developed a prolific output spanning abstract tape music, theatrical works, and collaborations with rock musicians, notably Michel Colombier on Messe pour le temps présent (1967). His collaboration with Spooky Tooth produced Ceremony (1969), influencing a generation of rock producers. He remained active into his final years at his private Apsomé studio in Paris.

British DJ, performer, and cultural producer born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and based in London, where they trained in Fine Art and became a fixture in the underground LGBTQ+ scene from around 2011. They founded INFERNO, one of London's first LGBTQ+ rave nights, whose programming fuses heavy techno edits of pop music with avant-garde performance and experimental visual art. They are a key organiser of London Trans+ Pride and have presented performances at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the V&A, and Tate Modern. Their debut release Hermaphrodite featured remixes by Louisahhh, Jasmine Infiniti, and others.

Born in 1977 in Fukushima Prefecture, he studied acoustic design and interaction design at Kyushu Institute of Design and the University of Tokyo, and is now an associate professor at the Faculty of Design, Kyushu University. He is a co-founder and participant of The Sine Wave Orchestra, a participatory sound performance project that creates collective sound representations from sine tones. His other projects include phono/graph, which explores relationships between sound, text, and graphics, and he co-organized dorkbot Tokyo. He has been supported by grants from Prix Ars Electronica and the Japanese Government Overseas Study Program for Artists.

Born in Detroit in 1963, he began DJing as The Wizard on radio stations WDRQ and WJLB, championing local techno artists including Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, and Juan Atkins. In the late 1980s he co-founded Underground Resistance with Mike Banks and Robert Hood before departing to launch the Chicago-based Axis Records in 1992. His subsequent solo work defined a hyper-minimal, functional strain of techno that became globally influential. He later created a new soundtrack for Fritz Lang's Metropolis and, in 2005, premiered Blue Potential, a piece arranged for classical orchestra. In 2017 he was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.

Istanbul Ghetto Club is a duo formed by Kamil and Mahmut, two musicians who met when one was playing bağlama and the other walked in looking for directions. Their project stretches between the pavyon taverns of Istanbul and the techno clubs of Berlin, blending traditional Anatolian instruments with modular synthesizers, and layering acid and psychedelic electronics over folk melodies. Known for combining non-linear storytelling and performance art with improvised club compositions, the duo links underground and mainstream, East and West, within a single set. Their live performances have attracted over one million organic views online.

Realistic Monk is the collaborative project of Carl Stone and Miki Yui. Stone is an American composer long based in Japan, widely recognised for his pioneering work in computer music and real-time digital sampling — live transformations of pre-recorded material that blur the boundary between composition and performance. Yui is a Japanese sound and installation artist whose practice centers on subtle, minimalist electronic forms, silence, and spatial listening. Together as Realistic Monk, the two bring these complementary approaches into dialogue, working from Japan with an aesthetic that is both technically rigorous and quietly subversive.

Viktoria Keddie is an American artist and musician working across performance, video, and sound, whose practice investigates ritual, body, and the transformative potential of sustained action. She creates immersive performances and installations drawing on her interest in mysticism, labor, and the political dimensions of collective experience. Keddie has collaborated with artists working in noise, experimental music, and performance art, situating her practice at the convergence of these fields. Her work engages the audience directly, often requiring extended attention and blurring the boundaries between performer and viewer.

Zeena Parkins (born 1956) is an American musician and composer based in New York, primarily known for her innovative approach to the harp. Playing both acoustic and electric harp with preparations, extended techniques, and electronics, she has transformed the instrument into a vehicle for noise, free improvisation, and contemporary composition. A long-standing member of the New York downtown scene, she has collaborated extensively with John Zorn, Yoko Ono, Ikue Mori, and many others. Her work as a composer extends to dance, theatre, and film, and she has received numerous commissions from ensembles and organisations across the US and Europe.

Ketev is the alias of Yair Elazar Glotman, a Berlin-based sound artist and composer working across electroacoustic composition, sound installation, and sculpture. As Ketev, Glotman produces ambient-techno works constructed from reel-to-reel tape loops manipulated through 4-track cassette decks, building slowly shifting rhythmic mantras beneath roaring textural layers. His self-titled debut cassette on Opal Tapes (2014) established the project in experimental and post-techno circles, followed by releases on Where To Now? Records including Singular Stare and Traces of Weakness. Outside of Ketev, Glotman records under his own name on contemporary classical work.

Mudboy is the solo project of Tim Hill, an American musician based in Providence, Rhode Island. Emerging from the Fort Thunder scene — the legendary communal art space and DIY venue that defined Providence's experimental underground from the late 1990s until its demolition in 2001 — and from the city's related noise and experimental community that remained active in the years following, his work uses organs, harmoniums, tape loops, voice and simple electronics to create hallucinatory, slow-burning recordings that sit between drone, lo-fi psychedelia and ritual folk.

An Australian audiovisual artist, he synchronises sound and laser in live performances that have been staged in over sixty cities worldwide, earning him a reputation as one of the foremost practitioners in the medium. His work TRIPTYCH, which premiered at Unsound Kraków in 2022, received the Isao Tomita Special Prize at Ars Electronica 2023. He holds a PhD in composition from Monash University and in 2016 became founding director of MESS (Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio), a non-profit dedicated to public access to the history of electronic instruments. Since 2008 he has composed scores for over twenty-five contemporary dance works.

Hifana is a Japanese beat music duo comprising Kohei Ishikawa and Wataru Utagawa, based in Tokyo. Working with traditional Japanese instruments — particularly shamisen and taiko drums — processed through live electronics, turntables, and sampling, they developed a distinctive style bridging Japanese traditional music and contemporary electronic beat production. Their music is energetic and visually driven, with live performances characterised by physical theatricality, attracting international attention through festival appearances and television placement. They represent a current of Japanese electronic music that engages playfully with the country's own musical heritage.

Oswaldo Lares is a Venezuelan musician and performer working with electronics, synthesis, and experimental composition. Based in Caracas or in Latin American diaspora networks, his practice engages with the tensions between Venezuelan musical traditions — joropo, electronic cumbia — and international experimental electronic music frameworks. He releases on independent labels and performs in Latin American and international experimental music contexts. His work represents part of a broader conversation among Latin American musicians about the relationship between local cultural identity and global experimental music practice.

Cassetteboy is a British media prankster duo comprising Steve Warlin and Mark Sutton, based in Bristol. Working with found audio from television, radio, and film, they construct comedic and politically pointed audio collages that repurpose public figures' speech to make them say things they never intended. Their targets have included David Cameron, Boris Johnson, and The Apprentice. Originally releasing on cassette in the 1990s, their internet-era video remixes have attracted enormous audiences, and their Cassetteboy vs. the News series became a defining format of British political comedy. They operate at the boundary of satire, plunderphonics, and audio art.

San Francisco-based sound artist and musician whose practice centres on what he calls action concrete — a method in which impromptu vocal outbursts and organic sounds are recorded, then dissected and rebuilt through electro-acoustic techniques to produce sequences that are, in his framing, organically impossible or inhuman. He was associated with the Cyclone warehouse near Hunter's Point, a venue dedicated exclusively to experimental sound, and has released recordings on Ground Fault and 23Five. He has collaborated with Dave Phillips and Scott Arford, among others, at the intersection of noise, performance, and conceptual sound art.

Berlin DJ and producer Michael Fiedler, known as Fiedel, has been a long-standing resident at Berghain and a defining figure in the city's left-field club music scene. Born in Brandenburg, he co-runs the labels Fiedelone and Fiedeltwo and has released on Ostgut Ton. As one half of the duo MMM alongside Erik Wiegand (Errorsmith), he helped shape a strain of club music that incorporates acid, electro, jungle, and dub alongside 4/4 structures. He was also a co-operator of the Wax Treatment parties with Mark Ernestus of Hard Wax and Basic Channel, a series that forged lasting connections between disparate areas of electronic music.

Born in 1977 and based in Seattle, this composer and phonographer works with field recordings of protests, legal proceedings, and environmental events, sculpting activist sound from documents of social change. On November 30, 1999, he recorded the WTO protests in Seattle amid pepper spray and rubber bullets, producing N30: Live at the WTO Protest. He holds an MFA from Bard College and a PhD in Sound and Media Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London. He teaches at the Peabody Institute and has released work on American Archive, Masters Chemical Society, and GD Stereo.

Tom Verbruggen is a Belgian drummer and percussionist active in experimental music and free improvisation contexts. He has been involved in the Belgian and wider European experimental music scene for many years, performing and recording with a range of musicians in settings that span extended improvisation, noise, and contemporary composition.

His playing is marked by an attentive, responsive approach that prizes listening and collective interaction. He has collaborated with musicians from across Belgium, the Netherlands, and beyond, and has appeared at festivals and in venues associated with experimental and improvised music.

Born in Melbourne, Florida in 1943, he studied film at UCLA before forming The Doors in Los Angeles in 1965 with Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, and Robby Krieger. His performances as vocalist drew heavily on shamanistic ritual and the writings of William Blake and Arthur Rimbaud. In 1969 he self-published two volumes of poetry, The Lords and the New Creatures, the first described as a thesis on film aesthetics. Light My Fire reached number one in 1967, but it was his confrontational stage presence and dark lyricism that made him a defining figure of the American counterculture. He died in Paris in July 1971, aged twenty-seven.

Merzbow is the noise project of Japanese artist Masami Akita (b. 1956), regarded as one of the most prolific and uncompromising figures in noise. Active since the late 1970s, Akita has produced several hundred releases across nearly every format, drawing from industrial music, free improvisation, and avant-garde electronics. His sonic language ranges from brutal walls of distortion to textured compositions revealing a formal awareness beneath the density. Akita's work intersects with S&M subculture, Japanese aesthetics, Dadaism — the name comes from Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau — and animal rights, a vegan commitment shaping releases on anti-whaling and animal liberation since the early 2000s.

Born in Mexico City in 1943, Mario Lavista studied at the National Conservatory under Carlos Chávez and Rodolfo Halffter, then in Paris at the Schola Cantorum, attending courses by Nadia Boulanger and Karlheinz Stockhausen. He founded the collective improvisation group Quanta in 1970 and the journal Pauta in 1982, which became one of Latin America's most important music publications. His opera Aura, based on a story by Carlos Fuentes, premiered at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in 1988. He was a member of El Colegio Nacional from 1998 and held a 1987 Guggenheim Fellowship. He died in November 2021.

Formed in Mexico City in 1976 by José Álvarez and Arturo Romo, who met at the Colegio de Bachilleres, the project made its live debut in February 1980 at UAM Azcapotzalco, a concert recorded for the American magazine Eurock. Drawing on damaged instruments, found objects, and electronic sequences, the group developed an approach blending industrial, electronic, and experimental acoustic music, collaborating in its early years with composer Arturo Meza. Active for over four decades, Oxomaxoma is recognised as one of the foundational projects in Mexican experimental music.

Born in Melbourne, Steve Heather is a percussionist, composer, and performance-maker based in Berlin. He studied percussion and improvisation at the Victoria College of the Arts in Melbourne, and performance art at Das Arts in Amsterdam, before relocating to Berlin in the mid-1990s, where he has since performed and recorded across Australia, Europe, the Americas, and Asia. His work spans free improvisation, electroacoustic music, noise, and drone, and he has been a member of the Splitter Orchestra — Berlin's large-scale collective rooted in the Echtzeitmusik scene — since its founding in 2010. Current projects include Stiff Leather, The Still, and Booklet.

Venetian Snares is the alias of Aaron Funk (born 1975), a Canadian electronic musician and producer from Winnipeg. A central figure in the breakcore and IDM scene, Funk developed a style of extreme rhythmic complexity — programming drum machines at tempos far beyond conventional speed with dense polyrhythmic structures — most fully realised on Rossz Csillag Alatt Született (2005), a breakcore album composed over Béla Bartók samples. He has released prolifically on Planet Mu and his own Timesig label, with dozens of records exploring different extreme electronic territories. His work is characterised by an almost compulsive productivity and technical ferocity.

Carlos Amorales (b. 1970) is a Mexican artist based in Mexico City whose practice spans performance, drawing, animation, music, and installation, often using a large archive of black silhouetted graphic forms developed as a personal visual vocabulary. He is perhaps best known for the masked wrestling persona Amorales — a figure whose appearances in performance, video, and publications interrogate identity, violence, and popular spectacle in Mexican culture — and for his music group Nuevos Ricos. His video and animation works translate this vocabulary into moving compositions drawn from his Liquid Archive, a digital database of vector graphics built since the late 1990s.

Kazuo Uehara is a Japanese sound artist and musician working with electronics and improvisation in experimental contexts. His practice investigates the sonic possibilities of electronic instruments through live performance and recording, exploring the material and physical dimensions of electronic sound. Active in Japanese experimental music communities, he has contributed to events and festivals dedicated to experimental sound and music. His work reflects sustained attention to the relationships between electronic sound production, space, and the specific conditions of listening that experimental music can create.

Èlg is the alias of Élie Mélé, a French musician and sound artist whose practice operates at the intersection of free improvisation, electronics, and noise. Releasing on labels including Editions Mego and Metamkine, he works with analogue electronics, prepared instruments, and tape to produce dense, textural works of formal and sonic unpredictability. Associated with the French experimental underground and the broader European free improvisation scene, his work is notable for its combination of physical directness and structural freedom.

Born in Albuquerque on 19 April 1957, he attended Oberlin College Conservatory of Music and became one of the first musicians to use a keyboard-less modular synthesizer as his primary instrument in free improvised music. He has collaborated with Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, and Fred Frith, and the Kronos Quartet premiered his composition All the Rage at Lincoln Center in 1993. A longtime political activist, he lived in El Salvador during the 1980s. He is professor emeritus of technocultural studies at UC Davis and has published seven books.

Keith Rowe (born 1940) is a British improviser and visual artist who was a founding member of AMM in 1965 alongside Cornelius Cardew and Eddie Prévost. He developed a radically non-idiomatic approach to electric guitar — placing the instrument flat on a table and treating it with radio signals, objects, and extended preparations, foregrounding texture and timbre over melody or harmony. His practice has been central to the development of free improvisation and electro-acoustic music in Europe, and his collaborations with Christian Wolff, Taku Sugimoto, and MIMEO place him at the intersection of composition and improvisation.

Agente Costura is the project of Lisa Simpson, a Brazilian artist, performer, seamstress, instrument builder, and noise musician based in Berlin. She studied visual arts at Universidade Tuiuti do Paraná, holds an MA from Emily Carr University, and is a graduate of Institut für Kunst im Kontext at Universität der Künste Berlin. Performing with sewing machines converted into noise boxes, self-made wearable electronic instruments — talking hats, musical handbags — and oscillating feedback machines, she has presented work at HKW Berlin, Akademie der Künste, Bimhuis Amsterdam, and Goethe Institut Jakarta.

Moin is a London-based group formed by Raime members Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead alongside vocalist Valentina Magaletti and bassist Lina Lapelyte — though more precisely, Moin is Andrews, Halstead, and Magaletti. Their music engages with industrial rhythms, post-punk, and electronic noise through a live and collaborative process. Albums on AD 93 including Moot! (2021) and Paste (2022) document their approach to propulsive, fractured sound that avoids genre fixity. Pockets appears on one of their releases. Magaletti also performs as part of Tomaga and Mabe Fratti.

Loren MazzaCane Connors (born 1949) is an American guitarist based in New York. Playing in a style derived from blues guitar but emptied of convention — slow, spectral, muted notes sustained by long silences — he has released an extraordinary quantity of recordings since the 1970s on labels including Family Vineyard, Ajax, and Table of the Elements. Diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1993, his playing continued with even greater economy, the condition transforming into an expressive tool. He has collaborated with Jim O'Rourke, Thurston Moore, and Keiji Haino. His music is consistently described in terms of grief, longing, and spectral presence.

Muqata'a is a Palestinian musician and producer based in Ramallah. Working with Arabic language hip-hop and experimental electronic music, his practice is marked by a commitment to articulating Palestinian experience and Arabic vernacular culture in contemporary sonic forms. He produces and records within the Palestinian underground, releasing on Al Qantara and other independent channels. His work is notable for its integration of political urgency and experimental sound construction, and he performs internationally while remaining grounded in the cultural and political realities of life in Ramallah. He is associated with Palestinian rap and the broader Arab experimental underground.

Takahiro Kawaguchi (born 1981) is a Japanese sound artist and improviser based in Kyoto. Working with objects, surfaces, and carefully constructed performance situations, he develops a practice of extreme quietness and attention — placing small objects in relationship to contact microphones and amplification to produce barely audible events of great textural complexity. He has collaborated with artists including Taku Unami, Toshimaru Nakamura, and Burkhard Stangl, and releases music on Erstwhile Records and other labels dedicated to minimal improvisation. His work continues the Japanese post-Onkyō tradition of listening to the edges of sound.

Musica Mosaica is a Brussels-based experimental music project releasing on Futura Resistenza. Their work approaches sound not as acoustic phenomenon alone but as a living reality — combining electro-acoustic improvisation, industrial rhythm, and conceptual composition. Their 2026 album Clock In, Clock Out uses time — as a musical parameter and as an organising principle of labour — to explore the intersection of industrial life and sonic structure. The project forms part of the broader Futura Resistenza community in Brussels, sharing a curatorial and political space with Gijs Gieskes, Nele Möller, and Frédéric Van de Velde.

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer whose work rooted in working-class Los Angeles — shaped by decades of poverty, alcoholism, menial labour, and the marginal urban life he documented with brutal directness and dark comedy — has had lasting influence across popular culture, underground literature, and music. His novels Post Office (1971), Factotum (1975), and Women (1978) developed a first-person confessional mode that filtered literary naturalism through a vernacular energy that made his work immediately accessible. His poetry — published across hundreds of small press collections — shares this quality, finding poetry in plain speech.

Born in Guadalajara in 1979, Israel Martínez is an artist who works across sound, video, photography, installation, and public intervention with a sustained focus on social and political reflection. Active in Mexico's underground music press since the mid-1990s, he trained in electronic music and sound art at the Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras. His composition Mi Vida received an Award of Distinction in the Digital Musics category of Prix Ars Electronica 2007. His work has been presented at MACBA, MUAC, the Moscow Biennial, and daadgalerie, and is released internationally on labels including Sub Rosa and Abolipop.

Mulatu Astatke (born 1943) is an Ethiopian musician, composer, and arranger, widely regarded as the father of Ethiojazz — a synthesis of Ethiopian modal scales and pentatonic structures with jazz harmony and Latin rhythm that he developed while studying at Berklee College of Music in the 1960s. Returning to Addis Ababa, he recorded a series of albums in the early 1970s for the Amha and Philips labels that became foundational texts of the Ethio-jazz canon, later compiled by Francis Falceto for the Éthiopiques series on Buda Musique. His music was prominently featured in Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers (2005), introducing him to a new international audience.

Born in Normandy in 1887, Marcel Duchamp upended the definition of art with his concept of the readymade — everyday objects designated as artworks, beginning with Bicycle Wheel in 1913 and culminating in Fountain, a porcelain urinal signed "R. Mutt" submitted to the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibition. His Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 caused a sensation at the 1913 Armory Show in New York. After moving to the United States he largely abandoned art-making for chess. Fountain was named the most influential artwork of the twentieth century in a 2004 poll of artists and historians. He died in 1968.

Brion Gysin (1916–1986) was a Canadian artist, painter, and writer whose experiments with language, chance, and perception — conducted primarily in Tangier and Paris — made him one of the most original and influential figures of the postwar avant-garde. Born in Taplow, England to a Canadian mother and a Swiss-German father, he spent much of his artistic life in Tangier's international zone and in Paris.

His most significant invention was the cut-up technique — the practice of literally cutting up texts and rearranging the fragments to produce new textual combinations — which he developed with William S. Burroughs in the late 1950s.

Otomo Yoshihide (born 1959) is a Japanese musician and composer based in Tokyo. Working as a turntablist, guitarist, and electronics improviser, he has been central to the Tokyo experimental scene since the early 1990s through his group Ground Zero — which produced confrontational collage music drawing on noise, free jazz, and pop debris — and numerous collaborative and solo projects. His turntable technique treats the record and needle as instruments, scraping, cutting, and layering at extreme speed. He has collaborated with dozens of musicians internationally and, in addition to his experimental work, has written film scores and led large-ensemble projects including his New Jazz Orchestra.

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986) was a Soviet filmmaker widely regarded as one of the greatest directors in cinema history. Born in Zavrazhye, Russia, he studied at the Soviet State Institute of Cinematography and made his feature debut with Ivan's Childhood (1962), which won the Golden Lion at Venice. His subsequent films — Andrei Rublev (1966/1969), Solaris (1972), Mirror (1975), Stalker (1979), Nostalghia (1983), and The Sacrifice (1986) — established a uniquely meditative and spiritually charged cinematic language.

Tarkovsky's films are celebrated for their long takes, complex relationship with time, and profound engagement with sound as a compositional element.

Matteo Marangoni was born in Florence in 1982 in a mixed Italian and American family of artists. He studied music performance, sound engineering, and cultural management before receiving a masters diploma from the ArtScience Interfaculty in The Hague in 2011.

His performances and installations present physical processes, sensory phenomena, and machines in ways that are both musical and theatrical. He works combine DIY electronics, digital systems, robotics, architectural spaces, humans, and other life forms.

Minoru Sato (recording as m/s or SASW) is a Japanese sound artist born in 1963 in Tokyo. His work engages with physical phenomena — resonance, standing waves, electrical signals, magnetic fields, thermal processes — treated as both the subject and material of installation and recording. Rather than representing these phenomena, his practice seeks to activate them as audible events, requiring attentiveness to the conditions under which sounds arise.

He founded the WrK collective and label in 1992 alongside Masahiko Okura, Kozo Inada, Toshiya Tsunoda and others, producing a distinctive body of work based on austere attentiveness to sonic fact.

Rainford Hugh Perry, known as Lee “Scratch” Perry OD, Lee “Scratch” Perry was a Jamaican producer, songwriter, singer, and DJ who helped reshape reggae music. He was among the first Jamaican producer-musician to use the studio as an instrument, and he pioneered the reggae instrumental form known as dub, in which sections of a rhythm track were removed, and others emphasized through echo, distortion, repetition, and backward tape looping. A legendary eccentric, he was known to blow marijuana smoke on his finished master tapes to give them the proper “vibe,” and he reportedly burned down Black Ark in 1980.

Mexico City-based visual and audio artist who, since the late 1990s, has combined video, audio, installation, and performance to construct experimental platforms centred on human behaviour as a territory where fears, projections, and instincts manifest. In 1996 he founded ENCEFALISIS, a noise and power electronics project described as a distortion outside the box—a resonance imaging of war noise and cataleptic transgression. Releases include Homónimo, Actos Paganos, 999, 13, ERROR, and Traga Traga Traga. He is a co-founder of the BINARIA collective, which promoted experimental, industrial, noise, performance, and video music in Mexico.

Born in Los Angeles in 1953, this electronic composer studied at the California Institute of the Arts under Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and has been composing electro-acoustic music since 1972. He is a pioneer of live computer performance and extended sampling, looping and deconstructing Japanese folk songs, soul, and pop into mesmerizing real-time transformations. His 3-LP archival set on Unseen Worlds was named best archival release of 2016 by The Wire. He divides his time between California and Japan.

Das Synthetische Mischgewebe is a German experimental project founded by Christoph Heemann in the early 1990s, producing noise and industrial music of sustained intensity through a combination of tape manipulation, electronics, and processed sound sources. Associated with the label Tara and later with Streamline and other imprints, the project has developed a dense, personal sound that influences contemporary dark ambient and noise artists. Heemann is also associated with Mirror and other collaborative projects, maintaining a consistently uncompromising approach to experimental electronic sound.

Arrigo Lora Totino (1928–2016) was an Italian sound poet, performer and visual artist. A pioneer of concrete poetry and phonetic experimentation, he produced vocal, tape and multimedia works that expanded the possibilities of language as sonic material. His contributions remain foundational to sound poetry and experimental vocal practices. Active within the Italian and European Neo-Avant-Garde from the 1960s onward, he collaborated with figures including Henri Chopin, and co-founded the Italian sound poetry movement, publishing the journal Modulo.

Maria W Horn is a Swedish composer and musician based in Stockholm. Working with pipe organ, synthesiser, and electronics, she develops compositions rooted in drone, sustained tone, and microtonal tuning — exploring the overlap between sacred acoustic instrument traditions and contemporary electronic sound. She has released on Ideal Recordings and performed internationally, and is a central figure in the current Swedish experimental music scene that engages with acoustic instrument modification, extended duration, and spectral listening. Her solo and collaborative work consistently attends to the resonant and spiritual dimensions of sustained sound.

Born in Stavanger, Norway in 1981 and based in Berlin since 2006, he is a percussionist, composer, and DJ working across improvised music, electronic music, and noise. He was a member of the high-energy duo MoHa! with guitarist Anders Hana, which expanded into the quartet Ultralyd. In Berlin he joined Splitter Orchestra, a twenty-five-piece improvising collective. His 2014 solo debut Bass Drum! on the +3dB label explored extended technique with a rotating prepared bass drum. He has contributed to over forty records and performed throughout Europe, North America, Oceania, and Asia with projects including The Pitch and NMO.

øjeRum is the Danish artist Paw Grabowski Hagens, based in Copenhagen. Working under this name from around 2012, he creates music of hypnagogic, psychedelic folk and tape collage, combining found sounds, acoustic instruments, and processing into works of considerable textural richness. He runs the Mynd label and releases prolifically across cassettes and vinyl, often producing handmade and limited editions. His music is associated with the international underground of folk experimentalism and lo-fi spiritualism, and he has released on Feeding Tube Records, Scissor Tail, and other labels alongside his own imprint.

Juan-Pablo Villegas (b. 1986, Mexico City) is a multidisciplinary artist working across film, sound, performance, and photography. His practice takes body perception and external stimuli as its starting points, investigating how these shape both personal and collective experience. In recent years his research has addressed the expansion of the sensible spectrum, the animist condition of objects, the materiality of memory, and the formation of the psychosomatic. He runs eseeme, a project space in downtown Mexico City.

Berlin-based composer and instrument builder born in 1986, with a background in hardware hacking and a focus on the artifacts produced by the tolerances and instabilities of analog systems. He performs with modular and hybrid synthesizers, custom electronics, and electronically amplified mechanical sound sources, working within metastable networks designed for spontaneous reorganization. His solo and collaborative work has been presented at Berlin Atonal, Blurred Edges Hamburg, and Silent Green Berlin, and released on labels including Cloudchamber Recordings. His research has received support from Musikfonds and Pro Helvetia.

Italian composer born on 4 December 1955 in Pomponesco who began producing electronic music in 1979, initially releasing cassettes under the alias Sacher-Pelz. Inspired by Tangerine Dream, Conrad Schnitzler, and Throbbing Gristle, he developed a practice rooted in industrial noise and dark ambience, with a stated goal of producing technological sounds that reflect modern decadence. His 1981 debut album Symphony for a Genocide set the tone for a prolific and uncompromising early output. He withdrew from music-making before returning in 1998, encouraged by Alga Marghen founder Emanuele Carcano, releasing new recordings and reissues through EEs'T Records over the following decades.

Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) was a French composer and organist born in Avignon. A devout Catholic, he developed a deeply personal musical language drawing on birdsong transcription, Hindu rhythmic theory, modes of limited transposition, and theological mysticism. His Quartet for the End of Time (1941), composed and premiered while interned at Stalag VIII-A during World War II, remains one of the twentieth century's most celebrated chamber works. As a teacher at the Paris Conservatoire he influenced Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis, and Murail among many others. His late work Éclairs sur l'Au-Delà (1991) is among his most expansive.

Camille Mandoki is a Mexico City-based electronic artist and composer. Born into a family with a rich artistic heritage — her father is the filmmaker Luis Mandoki — she began composing and experimenting with sound around age 19. Her music traverses experimental, electronic, and classical territory, drawing on influences that range from contemporary atonal composition to opera, and creating immersive soundscapes that resist easy categorisation. She released her debut album We Used to Talk for Hours (2016) on Static Discos, a collection of ten tracks composed between 2013 and 2015 marked by haunting vocals and intricate electronic arrangements.

Born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois in 1977, she received a BFA from Arizona State University and an MFA from the University of Southern California and has lived and worked in Los Angeles ever since. Her practice centres on sculpture and painting as intertwined disciplines: shaped aluminium wall works and floor sculptures carry hand-painted surfaces that operate simultaneously as painting and as object. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, and the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, and she installed a permanent work at the University of Illinois in 2019.

American artist, composer, and publisher (15 December 1938 – 25 October 1998) who was a co-founder of Fluxus and one of its most prolific theorists. In 1965 he coined the term intermedia to describe hybrid art forms occupying the space between established disciplines—sound poetry, visual poetry, happenings. His Something Else Press (1963–1974) published major avant-garde figures including John Cage, Gertrude Stein, Dieter Roth, Emmett Williams, and George Brecht, helping disseminate experimental art and writing internationally. In a sixty-year life he made sound works, films, happenings, paintings, drawings, and book art alongside theoretical writing on intermedia and Fluxus.

Felix Kubin (born Felix Knoth, 1969, Hamburg) is a German composer, radio artist, and electronic musician. Experimenting with synthesizer, organ, voice, and drum machine since the age of twelve, he founded the independent label Gagarin Records in 1998 — specialising in Dada-electronics at the edge of pop and experiment. He has released on Editions Mego, Bureau B, Dekorder, and Minimal Wave, and his radio plays have won the Hörspiel des Jahres (2012) and Deutscher Hörbuchpreis (2014). Large-scale works include Falling Still for string ensemble, boys' choir, and live electronics, and A Choir of Wires for twenty Korg MS-20 synthesizers.

Born in Mexico City in 1979, this visual artist and draughtsman works in large-scale drawing that addresses decomposition, the transitory, horror, and the occult as lenses for the social and existential consequences of living in a violent society of exploitation and consumption. Underground music, drone, and metal are central influences on his imagery, as is literature, horror fiction, and poetry. His series Strategies Against Architectures takes its title from an Einstürzende Neubauten album. He has held solo exhibitions at talcual gallery in Mexico City, Impronta Casa Editora in Guadalajara, and Kunstnerhuset Classensgade in Denmark.

Reinhold Friedl is a German pianist, composer, musicologist and ensemble director born in 1964, based in Berlin. He is founder and artistic director of Zeitkratzer, an ensemble he established that has become internationally recognised for its practice of performing fully notated acoustic realisations of works by artists from outside the classical concert world.

Zeitkratzer's realisations have included Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, works by Merzbow, Carsten Nicolai (Alva Noto), Keiji Haino, Whitehouse, Terre Thaemlitz and many others, creating a systematic and serious engagement between contemporary composed music and the broader field of experimental, electronic and noise practice.

Carlfriedrich Claus (1930–1998) was a German artist and philosopher who worked across poetry, drawing, graphics, and acoustics from his base in Annaberg-Buchholz in the GDR. From the 1950s onward he explored language and writing in terms of their tonal and visual content, producing intricate speech sheets and acoustic works that investigated pre-linguistic processes and human consciousness. His practice crossed the borders of the GDR and connected with international networks of visual and phonetic poetry.

Happa is a British producer and musician based in London. Working with club music, footwork, and experimental dance production, they release on the NON Worldwide network and other labels aligned with an international community of club music experimenters. Their productions combine rhythmic intensity with a formal interest in pattern and abstraction that distinguishes them from more conventionally functional club music. They are associated with a generation of British producers who have extended post-dubstep and footwork aesthetics in directions that prioritise structural experimentation alongside physical impact.

Norwegian composer who has worked with electroacoustic tools since the early 1980s, trained in computer music at New York University. Between 1993 and 2010 he directed NOTAM, the Norwegian Centre for Technology, Art and Music, which he built into the leading institution for digital music in Norway. He published Elektrisk Musikk i Norge in 2019, a comprehensive history of electroacoustic music and technology in his country. He currently holds a professorship at the Centre for Research in New Music (CeReNeM) at the University of Huddersfield, where his work has shifted toward historical and contextual research.

Fujiko Nakaya (born 1933, Sapporo) is a Japanese fog sculptor and video art pioneer. Daughter of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ukichiro Nakaya, she created the world's first fog sculpture at Expo '70 in Osaka and has since developed site-specific fog installations worldwide. A key figure in Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), she founded Video Gallery SCAN in Tokyo in 1980 and has collaborated with artists including Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown. Her work transforms architectural and natural environments using engineered water vapor as a sculptural medium.

Charmaine Lee is an Australian vocalist based in New York, born in 1991. Her practice is primarily concerned with risk-taking, playfulness, and improvisation, using the voice alongside feedback and live processing to explore what sound can mean when it abandons linguistic meaning and melodic convention entirely. The New Yorker has described her work as extraordinary, and she has been featured in the New York Times and Washington Post.

She is a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow (2025), an Emergent Ventures winner (2024), was an ISSUE Project Room Artist-in-Residence (2019), and a Roulette Van Lier Fellow (2021).

Born in 1983, Edka Jarząb is a Polish sound artist, poet, and activist whose practice begins with deep listening as a form of political engagement. She studied Hindustani raga in Varanasi and learned deep listening from Pauline Oliveros, integrating voice, radio waves, field recording, and electronics into performances, radio plays, and sound walks. She co-creates Warsaw's community station Radio Kapitał and from 2020 to 2021 was resident at the experimental studio WORM in Rotterdam. A permanent collaborator of Brussels platform Q-O2, she also studies the sonosphere of protests and organises sonic warm-ups before street demonstrations.

Erin Sexton is a Canadian artist and radio amateur based in the woods near Oslo in Norway. Her practice explores dimensionality, perception, language, and psychology via sci-fi abolitionist metaphysics. Besides ionospheric radio, her work includes sculpture, installation, video, and social practice. Pentadomen is an experimental project space that she co-curates with her drag persona MacGyv’r. They dissolve boundaries and subvert hierarchies using absurdist humour, painful honesty, and shameless trolling of the ‘rich and famous’. As a curator, MacGyv’r says yes to almost everything… a real giver and party animal, sometimes to his detriment.

Valeri Scherstjanoi (b. 1950, Saratov, Russia) is a Russian-German sound poet and visual artist based in Berlin whose physically intense performances of pure vocal sound poetry have made him one of the most distinctive voices in European experimental poetry since the 1980s. He has developed a practice of extended vocal technique, breath work, and sound production that strips language of semantic content, treating the voice as a source of pure sonic material. He organised the Bobeobi Festivals of Sound Poetry in Berlin from 1994 to 1998, and in 2012 performed at the Maxim Gorki Theater as part of Rainald Grebe's production DADA Berlin.

Mama Bär, born Andrea Katharina Ingeborg Göthling, is a German sound recordist and visual artist based in Flensburg. A self-taught artist, she began making music in 1999 and visual art in 2006. Ingeborg often works together with her husband Kommissar Hjuler, as Kommissar Hjuler und Frau. Mama Bär has a vast number of music releases available through independent labels such as Ultra Eczema, Intransitive Recordings, Nihilist Records, Obskyr Records, and others. She shares albums with Bomis Prendin, Franz Kamin, Philip Krumm, Wolf Vostell, and others.

Gol is an experimental musician and artist working with electronics, performance, and sound installation. The project's practice investigates the relationships between sound production, space, and listener experience through performances and recordings that take an unconventional approach to electronic music. Active in experimental music communities, Gol contributes to ongoing investigations of what experimental electronic music can be. Its work maintains a distinctive personal aesthetic that prioritizes sonic exploration and the investigation of unexpected relationships between electronic sounds and their contexts.

Swiss musician and activist born on 18 January 1969, he co-founded grindcore group Fear of God in the 1980s before launching his solo practice in 1987—first album 1994—and joining Schimpfluch-Gruppe with Rudolf Eb.er, Daniel Löwenbrück, and Joke Lanz. Describing his output as Ritual Protest Music, his work uses amplified field recordings, fire and animal sounds, and extended voice to engage ecology, animal liberation, and anti-civilisation politics. He has appeared on over 300 releases and performed roughly 800 concerts across 55 countries. Releases include the Tochnit Aleph document The Hermeneutics of Fear of God (2003).

Iri.gram is an electronic producer releasing music on False Aralia, the Los Angeles-based imprint founded in 2024 that Brian Foote runs as a sibling label to Peak Oil. The project works at the intersection of glacial minimalist electronics, two-step rhythmic structures, and experimental glitch, producing music that navigates dub ambient textures and rhythmic noise without settling into any single genre. The 2025 LP False 04 collects four tracks that demonstrate the project's propulsive compositional approach, interweaving sparse tonal material with restless percussion.

Arthur Russell (1951–1992) was an American cellist, vocalist, and composer who spent his career in New York producing a body of work that crossed disco, minimalism, folk, and pop with an idiosyncratic emotional directness that resisted all categorization. Born in Oskaloosa, Iowa, he studied composition in San Francisco before settling in New York, where he became embedded in the downtown experimental music scene of the late 1970s and 1980s.

Russell worked in multiple musical worlds simultaneously: he collaborated with minimalist composers at the Kitchen, produced dance music for clubs including the Paradise Garage, and recorded intimate, folklike solo material with voice and cello.

Born in Sauve, France, in 1926, he joined the Communist Party at seventeen, later earned an economics degree at UCLA while working for Coca-Cola in Los Angeles, and spent years as a United Nations economic adviser in Korea and Egypt. In the early 1960s he became central to the international Fluxus movement and, with George Brecht, coined the concept of the Eternal Network, a vision of art as a permanent, universal process embedded in everyday life. With Brecht he opened a workshop called La Cedille qui Sourit in Villefranche-sur-Mer in 1965. He died in a monastery in Les Eyzies in December 1987.

Born in 1957 in Brussels, Ontario, she earned her BFA from Queens University in 1980 and her MVA from the University of Alberta in 1983, where she met longtime collaborator and husband George Bures Miller. She created her first audio walk in 1991 during a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, and gained international recognition for the form in 1995. Using binaural audio, her walks layer recorded voices and sounds over real environments, creating a spectral doubling of place. In 2020 she and Miller were awarded the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize, given every five years to artists working in sculpture.

Born in Lausanne in 1979, Stéphane Kropf is a Swiss artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, and installation, with a sustained focus on the phenomenology of perception and optical effect. He studied at the Ecole cantonale d'art de Lausanne, where he now heads the Bachelor of Visual Arts programme. His large-format abstract canvases often employ interference paint — pigment capable of reflecting both a given colour and its complementary hue depending on viewing angle — to investigate the instability of visual experience. In 2014 he presented the exhibition AUDIO, VIDEO, OMNIA VOLVIT at Circuit in Lausanne; his work is held in the collection of the Mirabaud Group.

Cory O'Brien is a New York City-based sound artist active since 2003 in solo and collaborative projects spanning abstract drone, noise, and electroacoustic music. His work centres on field recordings, percussion, and feedback synthesis, exploring the nature of internal sounds and resonant sustained sound fields. Fascinated by recording technology from childhood — experimenting with radios and dictaphones found at junk stores, later spending time in punk bands before gravitating toward the more technical and structural dimensions of sound — his practice now operates in quieter, more physical sonic territories.

Rafaël Rozendaal (b. 1980) is a Dutch-Brazilian net artist working with websites, installations, and public works exploring digital media's aesthetic possibilities. His primary work consists of abstract interactive websites — single-serving works whose domain names function as titles — offering reduced, hypnotic visuals based on simple generative systems: colour gradients, collisions, and movements that respond to the mouse. Acquiring a Rozendaal website means acquiring its domain name and traffic, raising questions of ownership and value online. His work is held in major collections, including the Whitney Museum, which has acquired and commissioned several of his browser-based pieces.

Supersilent is a Norwegian improvisational group formed in 1997, comprising Arve Henriksen (trumpet), Helge Sten (Deathprod, electronics), Ståle Storløkken (keyboards), and initially Jarle Vespestad (drums). Their albums — numbered sequentially from 1–3 (1997) onward — document entirely improvised sessions without overdubs or editing, building atmospheres that range from extreme quiet to dense noise and oblique jazz. Released primarily on Rune Grammofon, they have produced one of the most consistently challenging bodies of work in Scandinavian experimental music. Sten's electronic processing and Henriksen's extended trumpet technique are defining components of their sound.

Born on 17 February 1949 in Heathfield, East Sussex, Fred Frith is a British guitarist, composer, and improviser who co-founded the avant-rock group Henry Cow in Cambridge in 1968 and remained central to it through its final album Western Culture (1978). His 1974 solo record Guitar Solos introduced prepared and extended techniques as purely compositional material, with no precedent in rock or contemporary classical practice. Over a career spanning more than fifty years, he has appeared on over 400 albums and collaborated with Robert Wyatt, John Zorn, Brian Eno, Derek Bailey, and Mike Patton, among many others. He has also composed extensively for film, dance, and theatre.

Founded in Chicago in 1995 by Mark Solotroff following the disbanding of his earlier group Intrinsic Action, Bloodyminded emerged from the industrial underground surrounding Wax Trax! Records and has maintained an uncompromising stance across three decades. The project deploys extreme volumes, confrontational live presence, and provocative lyrical content to address themes of violence, control, and transgression. Solotroff also runs Bloodlust! Records, the noise and metal label he established in 1994, and performs in several other groups including Anatomy of Habit and The Fortieth Day.

King Tubby (Osbourne Ruddock, 1941–1989) was a Jamaican sound engineer, record producer, and the father of dub music. Working from his home studio in Kingston, he developed the techniques of dub mixing — dropping instruments in and out, adding echo and reverb, isolating bass and drum — that transformed Jamaican music and had a worldwide impact on electronic music production. The Riley All Stars were the house band at the Channel One Studio, providing the rhythm tracks over which Tubby worked. Their collaborations produced definitive dub recordings in the late 1970s.

Born in San Rafael, California in 1955 and raised in Geneva, this Swiss-American artist and composer studied at the School of Visual Art in Geneva and the Massachusetts College of Art. He pioneered the use of vinyl records and turntables as instruments, splicing and reassembling discs in his Recycled Records series of the 1980s. His video work culminated in The Clock (2010), a 24-hour montage of film clips referencing each minute of the day, which won the Golden Lion at the 2011 Venice Biennale. He is represented by White Cube and Paula Cooper Gallery.

Marginal Consort is a Japanese free improvisation collective active since the early 1970s, founded by members of the Japanese experimental music underground. Known for their collective sound practice and their engagement with silence as a compositional element, the group has maintained a remarkably consistent and disciplined approach to free improvisation over five decades.

Their performances are characterized by an unusual degree of collective attention — the group listens and responds to each other with great care, producing music in which silence, barely audible sound, and sudden intensity coexist.

Dieter Kovačič is best known as dieb13, but he has also performed and recorded under the monikers Takeshi Fumimoto, Echelon, Dieter Bohlen, and dieb14.
He sprang into action in the late ’80s, as the Viennese avant-garde scene was picking up momentum. Since then, he has been one of the European key figures in the harnessing of tape players, vinyls, CDs, hard disks, and IP protocols as instruments.

He is the founder of the klingt. orchestra and runs the internet platform klingt.org.
Apart from his solo career, dieb13 collaborates with artists such as ErikM, Ignaz Schick, Billy Roisz, dieb13 vs. Takeshi Fumimoto, The John Butcher Group, Phil Minton, Jason Kahn, and Mats Gustafsson.

A retired professor of psychoacoustics and noise effects at the Technische Universitat Berlin, her research and teaching span acoustic ecology, soundscape studies, and human perception of environmental noise. She served as vice-president of the American Acoustical Society and the European Acoustics Association, and is a Distinguished International Member of the Institute of Noise Control Engineering. In 2010 she received the Hear the World Foundation Award and in 2012 the European Soundscape Award. She is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and an associate editor of the Journal of the Acoustical Society.

British artist and researcher whose work investigates the relationship between geological matter, software, and the human psyche through performance, installation, and laboratory practice. Since the late 1990s he has constructed experimental situations — walks, workshops, live events — that expose the hidden physical substrates of computing. His Earthboot project boots computers using naturally occurring electrical signals drawn directly from soil. Other works include The Crystal World, Psychogeophysics, and the ERD modular synthesizer series. From 1998 to 2005 he directed ap, a software performance group that pioneered early digital glitch aesthetics.

Dos Tracks is a minimal and abstract electronic music project documented through releases on small European labels during the 2000s and 2010s. The project works between minimal techno, drone, and reduced electronics, building compositions from sparse rhythmic elements and carefully maintained sonic tension. Releases reflect an interest in structural austerity and negative space, placing Dos Tracks within a lineage of European producers working in stripped-down machine music. The project maintains a low public profile consistent with its austere aesthetic. Its recordings reward close listening, revealing a concern with texture and pacing at the experimental end of the minimal techno field.

A flutist anchored in the Berlin free improvisation scene, she develops a personal language for the instrument through extended technique, electronics, and field recordings drawn from nature. She is a longtime member of Splitter Orchester, the 24-piece Berlin-based ensemble, and holds teaching positions at the University of Potsdam and the HMT Rostock, where she teaches Soundpainting. Her collaborators include George Lewis, Anthony Braxton, Tony Buck, Andrea Neumann, and Magda Mayas, situating her work at the intersection of acoustic and environmental sound.

Prayers is an American goth rock / post-punk band formed in San Diego, California, in 2013. The project is led by Rafael Reyes, also known as Leafar Seyer (his name spelled backward), who is the band’s primary songwriter, vocalist, and creative force.
Prayers blend darkwave, post-punk, industrial, and deathrock with themes drawn from religion, violence, redemption, love, and Chicano identity. Their music is notable for its stark emotional intensity, minimal yet driving arrangements, and Reyes’s deep, spoken-sung vocal style.

Trans Am are an American band from Washington D.C., formed in 1990 by Phil Manley, Sebastian Thomson, and Nathan Means. Beginning as an instrumental post-rock group releasing on Thrill Jockey, they evolved through several phases — embracing electronic music, synthesisers, and a sardonic engagement with 1980s rock idioms — producing a substantial body of work that defies simple categorisation. Albums including Red Line (1997), Futureworld (1999), and TA (1999) demonstrate an ability to move between motorik rock, electro, and satirical hard rock without losing formal coherence. They have remained active and critically respected across more than three decades.

Karl Hyde (b. 1957) is the vocalist, lyricist, and visual artist of Underworld, the British electronic group he co-founded with Rick Smith. His lyric writing is characterised by a fragmented, observational style — recording overheard speech and environmental detail in small notebooks — producing texts of unusual density when performed over electronic music. Beyond Underworld, Hyde has pursued a solo career and a practice in visual art, film, and painting. His collaborations with Brian Eno extended his work into new territory. As a performer, his restless physical stage presence feeds directly into the large abstract paintings he makes from gestures rehearsed on stage.

Born in Honolulu on 20 May 1959, Israel Kamakawiwoʻole — widely known as IZ — became the most celebrated voice of the Hawaiian Renaissance. He co-founded the Makaha Sons of Niʻihau in the 1970s, a group that released fifteen albums and brought Hawaiian language and tradition to new audiences across the Pacific and mainland United States. His 1993 album Facing Future became the first Hawaiian record certified platinum, and his medley of Somewhere Over the Rainbow and What a Wonderful World spent 375 weeks at the top of the Billboard World Digital Songs chart. NPR named him one of the 50 Great Voices in 2010. He died on 26 June 1997.

Angelo Harmsworth is a sound artist originally from New Mexico, now based in Berlin. His music spans drone, ambient, and harsh noise, with a practice centred on extremes held in tension: austere minimalism and dense, visceral physicality occupy the same compositional space. He has released experimental work since the early 2010s on Angoisse, Bathetic Records, Total Black, Opal Tapes, and his own label Lime Lodge. Albums include Overture Untitled, Without Blinking, and Singe. His meticulously sculpted tonal layers align with harsh noise aesthetics while retaining qualities of ambient and drone music.

Born in 1955 of Latvian-Estonian descent, Kalle Aldis Laar is a German musician, sound artist, DJ, and radio play author based near Munich. He studied medieval history and history of science at LMU Munich, then from 1989 toured Europe, the USA, and Japan with Japanese percussionist Takashi Kazamaki, giving over a hundred concerts in free improvisation. He co-founded the Temporary Soundmuseum in Munich with Barbara Holzherr, edits for the Trikont label, and teaches sound at Munich University of Applied Sciences. His Metropolis radio project received the Radio Play of the Year award in 2001.

Torba is the recording name of Italian sound artist Mauro Diciocia, active in underground tape and vinyl circles for more than a decade. His work draws on the musique concrete and tape-music tradition, reworking field recordings and found audio through magnetic tape and digital processing into lo-fi noise and drone soundscapes.

Diciocia has issued numerous small-run cassettes on his own Edizioni Aaltra imprint, including Musica Convenzionale. Musique Inconcrete, released on Fragment Factory in 2019 as the second part of an informal trilogy called Le Musiche, was his first full-length vinyl release, alongside other titles such as Ggran and sqort.

The Great Learning Orchestra is a Stockholm-based improvising ensemble led by Magnus Granberg, active since the early 2000s. Taking its name from Cornelius Cardew's experimental composition, the ensemble works in the tradition of minimal improvisation and composed indeterminacy, developing slowly evolving collective music drawing on contemporary composition and non-idiomatic free improvisation. They have released on Potlatch and other European labels dedicated to quiet and patient sound. Their practice is marked by sensitivity to listening, duration, and collective decision-making.

Anthony Pateras is an Australian composer and musician active since 1999 whose work spans modern classical composition, electroacoustics, piano improvisation, and film soundtrack. Based for much of his career in Melbourne and later in Europe, he has developed a practice grounded in aural hallucination and polytemporality, combining bespoke electronic materials with idiosyncratic instrumental writing that resists conventional categorization.

His piano playing is a distinctive element of his practice — percussive, technically extreme, and driven by an improvisational intelligence that operates within composed frameworks.

Born in Porto in 1980, he is a drummer, percussionist, and cymbalsmith whose approach treats the making of instruments as inseparable from composition. He fabricates custom cymbals and gongs for specific recordings, shaping the timbral outcome before a note is played. He has performed and recorded with groups including HHY and the Macumbas, Sektor 304, Talea Jacta, and Paisiel, and collaborated with Z'EV, Evan Parker, and Fritz Hauser. His solo work, including the album Membrana, pursues what he calls ethno techno: a tension between mechanical loops and organic ritual, dancefloor momentum and circular mantra.

Anne-F Jacques is a sound artist based in Montreal, Canada. She is interested in amplification, oblique interactions between materials, and the construction of various contraptions and idiosyncratic systems. Her particular focus is on low technology, trivial objects, and unpolished sounds. She regularly realizes installations, performances, and ephemeral interventions and gives workshops about domestic appliances hacking. She has worked amongst others with Tsonami Festival (Chile), Experimental Intermedia (New York), Ftarri (Tokyo), CTM (Berlin), Umbral (Mexico), Centrale for Contemporary Arts (Brussels), High Zero (Baltimore), and MEM (Bilbao).

Intersystems was a Canadian multimedia collective active in Toronto from 1967 to 1969, consisting of John Mills-Cockell, Blake Parker, Michael Hayden, and Mick Stott. They combined electronics, light, performance, and poetry in events that were among the most ambitious multimedia works in North American experimental culture of the late 1960s. Their recordings, including Number One (1968), are extraordinary early examples of psychedelic electronics and avant-garde music. They were rediscovered decades after their original limited release and are now recognized as important pioneers of Canadian experimental culture.

V/Vm is an alias used by British artist James Kirby, also known as Leyland Kirby and The Caretaker. Under this name from the late 1990s into the 2000s, he produced provocative, transgressive work combining mangled pop samples, noise, and conceptual gestures — releases often appeared under fake or ironic labels and used aggressive recontextualisation of familiar material. The Test Records imprint was central to this output. The project sits in a space between noise music, culture jamming, and the broader tradition of radical recontextualisation in sound.

Kap Bambino is a French electronic duo comprising singer Caroline Martial and producer Orion Bouvier, formed in Bordeaux. Their aggressively abrasive sound combines distorted noise, industrial electronics, and Martial's confrontational, physically intense vocals into a form of French harsh noise-pop. Releasing on Because Music and their own Impostor label, albums including 0°° (2006) and Blacklist (2010) established them in international alternative and electronic music circles. Their live performances are characterised by extreme energy and volume. They are one of the more distinctive and uncompromising acts to emerge from the French underground.

Martine Syms (b. 1988) is an American artist, publisher, and cultural practitioner based in Los Angeles whose work spans video, performance, installation, and publishing, addressing Black representation, popular culture, technology, and vernacular aesthetics with formal sophistication and critical intelligence. She founded Dominica Publishing in 2007 as a platform for books on Black visual culture, and her video works draw on Black TV, film, and internet culture as formal resources. These works — often involving a fictional alter-ego and a layered approach to narrative, text, and image — include the Lessons series and the sitcom She Mad, mining footage into a fragmentary self-portrait.

Anna von Hauswolff is a Swedish musician and composer born in 1986 in Gothenburg. She is best known for her work with the pipe organ — an instrument she approaches with a combination of devotion and extremity, using its vast dynamic range to construct slowly evolving sonic environments that move between fragile beauty and overwhelming heaviness.

Her albums — including Ceremony (2013), The Miraculous (2015), Dead Magic (2018), and Mythopoeia (2021) — have been widely praised for their synthesis of dark folk, drone, doom metal, and classical music.

Albert Mayr (1943–2024) was an Italian composer of experimental and electroacoustic music. He studied in Bolzano, Florence, and Darmstadt, working with Pietro Grossi in Florence from 1963 to 1969 before a period at McGill University in Montreal. He taught electronic and experimental music at the Florence Conservatory until 1990 and participated in the World Soundscape Project in 1975. His practice engaged with soundscape, time perception, and environmental sound, and he founded the Musica Oggi association in 1980 to support experimental music culture in Italy.

James McVinnie is a British organist based in London, widely regarded as one of the leading interpreters of contemporary music for the instrument. He has premiered works by Steve Reich, Nico Muhly, Tristan Perich, and Anna Meredith, and recorded Perich's Interval Studies for organ and 1-bit electronics. He has held positions at Westminster Abbey and St. George's Windsor, and performed at the BBC Proms, Barbican, Carnegie Hall, and Muziekgebouw. His recordings appear on Bedroom Community and other labels, and he has collaborated extensively with composers at the intersection of classical, minimalist, and electronic music.

Formed in Caen in 1979 by Jean-Luc André, Sylvie Martineau-Fée, and Jean-Philippe Fée—all alumni of the Beaux-Arts de Caen—Déficit Des Années Antérieures became one of the defining groups of the French experimental underground. Their sound draws on avant-punk, surrealist improvisation, industrial, lo-fi no-wave, and electro-acoustic collage, filtered through a naïve and emotionally direct aesthetic. Active for over two decades, the collective participated in more than thirty international compilations, released six cassettes, six 45s, four LPs, and five CDs, and produced seven video works. Collaborations with reference artists from across the international underground have continued.

Vancouver-based electronic musician, sound artist, and educator whose practice spans composition, sound installation, radio art, media archaeology, printmaking, and textiles. Described by The Guardian as a virtual one-man Radiophonic Workshop and praised by The Wire for two beguiling electronic albums, he has exhibited across Canada, the United States, and Europe. His Universal Synthesizer Interface series explores vintage MIDI sequencing software from the 1980s and 1990s. He also works in sound design for dance and theatre and performs in the duo Spell with prOphecy sun.

Rudolf Eb.er is a performance artist based in Japan known for producing obscure and challenging audio work under the name Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck. His work explores the human psyche, death, and reality by combining outsider art and actionism with extreme sonics, psychoactive acoustics, and cut-up compositions.

Eber’s research and work delve deep into the nethermost regions of the human psyche. Combining abreactive and cleansing actionism with sonic rituals and psychoactive acoustics, Eb.er generates audio-environments into which he plants grotesque psycho-magic rituals and tantric exercises to trigger a higher awareness.

Rogelio Sosa is a Mexican composer and sound artist born in 1977, based in Mexico City. His electroacoustic compositions are often dense, layered and structurally intricate, drawing on a thorough grounding in the European and Latin American electroacoustic tradition alongside a sustained engagement with improvisation, installation and audiovisual practice. He studied at IRCAM in Paris and holds advanced degrees in music and technology.

His compositions appear on labels including Intolerancia and Tukuyachay.

Tetsuo Furudate is a Tokyo-born artist who began in experimental film and video art in 1981 before turning toward sound through performance during the mid-1980s, becoming part of the early Japanese noise scene alongside figures such as Merzbow. Since 1998 he has worked extensively across Europe, presenting concerts and releases throughout the continent.

His output spans noise, industrial, and modern composition, including collaborations with Zbigniew Karkowski, Kasper T. Toeplitz, and Leif Elggren, notably the album World As Will on Staalplaat. In 2001 his experimental noise opera Othello premiered at Podewil in Berlin. He received the Blaue Brucke prize in 2003.

Born in West Palm Beach, Florida in 1987, now based in Berlin. He works across industrial rhythms, acidic electronics, and ambient sound, releasing music on labels including L.I.E.S., Viewlexx, Ascetic House, and Alter. Since 2013 he has run the label PL—variously glossed as Primitive Languages, Psychic Liberation, or Potentially Listenable—through which he has built a sprawling catalogue of recordings for tape, vinyl, and digital formats. His practice extends beyond recorded music to installation and participatory art contexts.

Martín Escalante is a self-taught Mexican saxophonist and improviser from Guanajuato, based in Los Angeles. Working exclusively on alto saxophone — slightly modified to extend its range of multiphonics and voice extensions — he plays harsh noise acoustically with no effects, no electronic processing, and no edits. He founded Sploosh Records (2012) and Wash and Wear Records to release his own work and artists from Mexico, the USA, Chile, Norway, and Peru. He is also a photographer and filmmaker, and supervised the soundtrack for his brother Amat Escalante's film La Región Salvaje. Collaborators include Otomo Yoshihide, Toshimaru Nakamura, and Teté Leguía.

lovesliescrushing is the project of Scott Cortez and Melissa Arpin-Duimstra, an American duo working in shoegaze, drone, and noise since the early 1990s. Distinguished from conventional shoegaze by a more extreme commitment to abstraction — guitar and vocals so heavily processed as to become pure texture and harmonic cloud — their releases on Projekt Records including Bloweyelashwish (1993) and Chorus (1995) established them as the most extreme and formally adventurous band in the shoegaze-adjacent space. Their output has continued sporadically for three decades, always characterised by overwhelming sonic density and extreme attenuation of recognisable musical structure.

Philadelphia-based sound artist and musician Eric Laska works primarily in sound installation and performance, with a practice that centres on language, voice, and the conventions of song. His work has been presented at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in New York, Machine Project in Los Angeles, Ausland in Berlin, and MACO in Oaxaca, as well as through online platforms including Gauss PDF and Ear Wave Event. In 2024 he released Original Songs, a record of vocals, electric guitar, and bass. His writing and sound work both operate at the edges of intelligibility and address the slippage between meaning and sound.

Manuel Göttsching (1952–2022) was a German musician and composer, founder of the kosmische/krautrock group Ash Ra Tempel alongside Klaus Schulze and Hartmut Enke in Berlin in 1970. A defining figure of the Berlin School of electronic music, his 1981 solo recording E2-E4 — a continuous seventy-minute synthesizer improvisation, released in 1984 — is widely cited as a direct precursor to house and techno. His work, continued under the Ashra alias, also included a collaboration with Timothy Leary and decades of electronic experimentation.

Born in the Netherlands in 1958, he came to synthesizer design through an arts background, having trained as a sculptor and jeweler before completing eleven years of study in information technology. Working from The Hague, he developed some of the most distinctive instruments in electronic music, including the chaos-driven Blippoo Box and the Benjolin, both of which use his Rungler circuit to generate unpredictable, organic sound patterns. He also contributed patches to the Nord Modular G2 and built the Hordijk Modular System. He died in September 2022 at the age of 64.

Ellen Fullman is an American composer, instrument builder, and performer who studied sculpture at the Kansas City Art Institute before moving to New York in the early 1980s. In Kansas City, she created and performed in an amplified metal sound-producing skirt and wrote art songs, which she recorded in New York for a small cassette label. In 1981, she began developing the Long String Instrument in her studio in Brooklyn — an instrument consisting of dozens of metallic strings up to seventy feet long, played with rosin-coated fingers and producing a chorus of organ-like partials.

The Long String Instrument has been compared to the experience of standing inside an enormous grand piano.

A professor at the Berlin University of the Arts since 2009, she leads the theoretical axis of the Sound Studies and Sonic Arts master's programme. Her academic background spans German literature, philosophy, and musicology, and she completed her habilitation before joining the UdK faculty. Since 2019 she has directed the DFG-funded research project Hearing the Other, focused on aesthetics in experimental music and sound art. Her books include Alternatives to Work Aesthetics: John Cage and Helmut Heissenbüttel (1999) and 1968 and the Avantgarde (2008).

Younes Zarhoni is a Moroccan sound artist and musician whose practice engages with Arabic music traditions, field recording, and electronic composition. Working in international experimental music contexts, he develops work that draws on Moroccan musical heritage — Gnawa, Andalusian, and Berber traditions — while engaging with contemporary sound art practice. His recordings and performances participate in broader conversations about the intersection of North African musical traditions with experimental electronic music and improvisation.

Based in Los Angeles and originally from Oakland, California, this sound and transmission artist works with radio, broadcast, and sonic experiment. She received the Clifton Webb Scholarship of the Arts from UCLA and a Graduate Opportunity Fellowship, and in June 2026 undertook a residency at Wave Farm in New York, developing new work for broadcast on WGXC 90.7-FM. Her practice draws on the layered cultural inheritances of her upbringing and explores how transmitted sound shapes experience and community.

Dntel is the alias of James Tamborello (born 1975), a Los Angeles-based electronic musician. His album Life Is Full of Possibilities (2001) on Plug Research included the track (This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan, a collaboration with Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie that anticipated the Postal Service project they would record together. Dntel's electronic music occupies a space between glitchy IDM and bedroom pop sentimentality, with a focus on warmth and melody unusual in the West Coast experimental scene of the time. He continued releasing under the Dntel name through the 2000s and 2010s, maintaining a low-key but distinctive presence in independent electronic music.

Lightning Bolt is the American noise rock duo of bassist Brian Gibson and drummer Brian Chippendale, formed in Providence, Rhode Island in 1994. Playing at extreme volume and speed, they developed a ferocious live practice, performing on the floor among audiences rather than on raised stages — collapsing the distance between band and crowd and generating a physical intensity rarely matched in rock music. Their recordings distil this energy into dense, overwhelming compositions drawing equally from punk, free jazz, thrash metal, and electronic noise. Albums including Wonderful Rainbow (2003) and Hypermagic Mountain (2005) established them as a defining force in American noise rock.

Gaelynn Lea Tressleris is an American folk singer, violinist, public speaker, and disability advocate born in 1984. Born with osteogenesis imperfecta, a genetic condition that causes complications in the development of bones and limbs, she developed a unique technique for violin that involves holding the bow like a bassist, with the body of the instrument placed in front of her like a cello, attached to her foot to prevent slipping.

This technique — born of necessity — produces a distinctive sound that has become inseparable from her musical identity.

Born in Rotherham in 1966, Mark Fell studied experimental film and video art before returning to computational music and synthetic sound. He first gained wider recognition through SND, his duo with Mat Steel whose minimal algorithmic techno appeared on Mille Plateaux and Raster-Noton. His solo practice spans spatial sound, installation, choreography, and critical writing, and draws on contemporary philosophy, subcultural history, and radical politics. His work has been presented at MoMA, the Barbican, the Serpentine, Whitechapel Gallery, and MACBA, among many others.

Based in Mexico City, he is a sound artist, curator, and researcher whose practice expands across scores, performances, documentary, and archival work. Since 2013 he has co-directed Umbral, a festival and project space devoted to sound experimentation that alternates monthly between Mexico City and Oaxaca. In 2015 he founded CCADDASM, an institution building an alternate historiography of sound practices in Mexico from pre-Hispanic sonic objects to 20th-century sound art, working with documentation centres, private collections, and artists to recreate performances and develop oral histories.

Dutch sound artist born in 1983, she developed her practice at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, becoming interested in natural phenomena and translations between time-based processes and still images. Working at the intersection of visual art and machine-making, her performances and installations use sensory physical experiments as their basis. Works include Elektrolab, a performance based on electrochemistry, Thermokoppel, exploring acoustic properties of metal through temperature, and Ground, an audiovisual performance using graphite drawings as a control interface for electronics. She is part of the Instrument Inventors Initiative (iii) and the artist collective Helicopter in The Hague.

Born in Büdingen in 1954, Stephan Dillemuth is a German artist whose work spans painting, performance, video, installation, and publication, consistently probing the social and institutional conditions of artistic life. He studied at the art academies in Munich and Düsseldorf, and has taught art pedagogy at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich for many years. His research method, which he calls 'bohemistic', draws on historical movements such as the German life reform movement and Munich's turn-of-century bohemia. In 1985 he repainted the entire Gallery of Beauties at Schloss Nymphenburg through a punk lens; from 1997 he collaborated with Werner von Delmont on the publication Corporate Rokoko.

Jonathan Scherk is a musician and composer releasing on the Berlin-based Faitiche label, founded by Jan Jelinek. His album Toon presents compositions that work at the boundary of electronic music and structural playfulness, drawing on the label's commitment to music that engages with systems, repetition, and sonic material with rigour and wit. Faitiche has published work by Jelinek, Masayoshi Fujita, and others interested in music that foregrounds process and material. Scherk's contribution to the label continues this inquiry into the formal possibilities of electronic composition.

Cornelius Cardew (1936–1981) was an English experimental music composer who studied at the recently established Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne and served as an assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen from 1958 to 1960. This early exposure to European avant-garde composition gave way to a radical rethinking of music's social and political possibilities. In 1969 he founded the Scratch Orchestra with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons — an experimental performing ensemble open to musicians and non-musicians alike.

Frédéric Acquaviva is a French composer and sound artist whose practice is rooted in the avant-garde tradition while engaging with contemporary questions of performance, text, and institutional critique. He has organized major retrospectives of work by Ghérasim Luca and Henri Chopin and produces his own compositions that engage with voice, noise, and text. He runs the label aaa — the 'Association des années amont' — and has collaborated with visual artists and composers internationally. His curatorial and critical work has helped preserve and extend the legacy of European sound poetry.

Born in 1977 and based in Eindhoven, this Dutch electronic musician and industrial designer studied at Design Academy Eindhoven and has built custom audiovisual instruments since 1998. Working through circuit-bending, modular synthesis, and electro-mechanical construction, he invents devices that often re-appropriate obsolete technologies. His approach is self-taught in key respects: early innovations included using a speaker as a relay and independently rediscovering the vactrol and phase-locked loop. His hand-built instruments are sold as kits and exhibited internationally, and he has performed at the Ableton Loop festival and Sonic Acts.

Founded around 2012 under the name Punk Is Dada, OMSK Social Club is an anonymous European artist collective that merges Live Action Role Play with contemporary art and club culture. Their signature methodology, Real Game Play, coined in 2017, uses collective immersion and speculative worldbuilding: participants mine cryptocurrencies to gain entry, then receive fictional identities to inhabit throughout multi-day events. With over 4,000 participants across Europe, their projects have explored topics including cryptoraves, consensus rituals, DAOs, and decentralised currencies.

Mark Fisher (1968–2017) was a British cultural theorist, writer, and critic whose work reframed how capitalism, mental health, and popular culture are understood. His book Capitalist Realism (2009) argued that it had become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism — a diagnosis that became one of the defining formulations of the early twenty-first century. Writing as k-punk from 2003, Fisher moved between hauntology, electronic music, horror film, and political theory with rare fluency. He lectured at Goldsmiths and co-founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit in the 90s. His book Ghosts of My Life (2014) extended this into a theory of hauntology and lost futures.

The American artist and musician widely credited as the father of circuit bending, a practice he discovered accidentally in the 1960s when a toy amplifier short-circuited against a metal surface in a desk drawer and produced cascading oscillating tones. He built instruments and consulted for musicians including Tom Waits, Peter Gabriel, and King Crimson, and his work entered the permanent collections of MoMA, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney Museum. His 2005 book Circuit-Bending: Build Your Own Alien Instruments brought the technique to a broad audience and established it as a recognised strand of experimental instrument-making.

Born Jesus Christ Allin in Lancaster, New Hampshire on 29 August 1956, he adopted the name GG and became the most notorious live performer in American punk: slashing himself with glass, fighting audience members, and defecating onstage, earning multiple arrests and a 1989 prison sentence for assault. Beginning with the Jabbers in the late 1970s, he led various backing bands before settling with the Murder Junkies, who recorded the album Brutality and Bloodshed for All in April 1993. GG Allin died of a heroin overdose in New York City on 28 June 1993, hours after what proved to be his final concert.

An English post-punk duo formed in Nottingham in 2007, built around the words of vocalist Jason Williamson and, from 2012, the deliberately minimal backing tracks of Andrew Fearn. Williamson began developing the project in 2005 at Rubber Biscuit Studio in Nottingham; the two met that year when Williamson heard Fearn performing in a Chameleon club basement. Their breakthrough albums Austerity Dogs (2013) and Divide and Exit (2014) established a template: acerbic, ranting lyrics over looped beats and bass, constituting one of contemporary music's most sustained critiques of austerity-era Britain. Their 2023 album UK Grim reached number three on the UK Albums Chart.

6SISS is the solo project of Peter Adriaenssens, a Belgian producer and DJ working in dark rhythmic electronic music. Based in Belgium, the project spans genres including industrial techno, experimental electronic, glitch, and noise, with releases on Diffuse Reality Records and other underground labels. The QUASAR EP and the METRIC EP represent recent output, demonstrating a sound built on dense, distorted textures and fractured rhythmic structures. 6SISS performs and releases within a circuit of European experimental and techno communities, maintaining an active presence on Bandcamp and across DJ platforms.

Ariel Guzik (born 1960) is a Mexican artist, inventor, and musician based in Mexico City whose practice integrates science, art, and ecology through self-built devices and instruments. His works — including Cordiox, designed to receive signals from dolphin communication — blend experimental acoustics, biology, and poetic speculation into immersive installations. He has exhibited at major institutions including the Palacio de Bellas Artes and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2018. His approach treats acoustic phenomena as a medium for inter-species and interplanetary communication, making him one of the most original artists at the intersection of science and sound art.

Born in Dublin in 1977, Eoin Mc Hugh lives and works in Berlin, creating paintings, watercolours, and sculpture that hover between hyperrealism and surrealist distortion. His works present warped, phantasmagoric visions rendered with the technical precision of seventeenth-century Dutch Old Masters, exploring the space between image, object, and unconscious thought. He has exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin, the Kerlin Gallery, and internationally, with his paintings, watercolours, and bronze sculptures engaging recurring questions about how the mind responds to what the eyes perceive.

La Polla Records was a Spanish punk rock band formed in 1979 in Salvatierra/Agurain, Álava, in the Basque Country. Founded by singer Evaristo Páramos, they were among the first punk bands in Spain to sing in Spanish, releasing their debut EP ¿Y ahora qué? in 1983 on the Oihuka label. Their blunt social and political lyrics, confrontational live performances, and roots in the Basque underground scene of the 1980s made them a defining group in Spanish punk culture. The band split in 2003; singer Evaristo continued with Gatillazo.

Kyoto-based ethnographer, field recordist, and filmmaker Eisuke Yanagisawa focuses on the acoustic and cultural dimensions of specific places. Since 2006 his primary research has centred on the gong culture of ethnic minorities in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, resulting in ethnographic films and a Sublime Frequencies LP of recordings of the Bahnar people spanning 2006 to 2015. His sound art practice involves capturing inaudible and ultrasonic material through specialised microphones, and extends to underwater soundscapes and experimental video that traces the interaction between humans and objects through close attention to sound.

Born in 1931 in Abbeville, France, to Polish parents repatriated after the war, he studied at the School of Art and Design in Łódź and at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. In 1965 he began the project 1965/1–∞: painting consecutive integers from one toward infinity across canvases of identical dimensions — 196 by 135 centimetres, the size of his Warsaw studio door — using white paint on a progressively lightening grey ground, adding one percent more white with each canvas. He also photographed himself before each completed surface and recorded himself speaking every number aloud. By 2004 he had reached 5.5 million. He died in 2011.

Alberto Boatto (1930–2017) was an Italian art critic and historian, one of the most influential voices writing on contemporary art in Italy from the 1960s onward. He wrote extensively on Pop Art, helping introduce and contextualize the movement for Italian audiences, and later turned his attention to photography, the body, and new media.

A prolific essayist and teacher, Boatto contributed to major Italian newspapers and magazines and authored numerous books examining the relationship between art, mass culture, and technological change — work that shaped how generations of Italian artists and critics understood the avant-garde's engagement with everyday imagery.

Duran Duran Duran is a Canadian noise act from Toronto working in extreme harsh noise and power electronics. Named as an ironic doubling of the 1980s pop group, the project deploys maximal electronic distortion and feedback in the tradition of Japanese noise and American power electronics. Releases on Chondritic Sound and related labels demonstrate a commitment to sonic extremity with an awareness of the cultural politics of noise. The project participates in a North American noise underground that maintains active connections to European and Japanese noise traditions.

Cex (Ryan J. Kidwell, born 1981) is an American electronic musician and rapper from Baltimore. Beginning with bedroom electronic music and IDM, he developed toward a hybrid of lo-fi electronics and hip-hop that was among the more idiosyncratic releases on Tigerbeat6 and other experimental labels in the early 2000s. Albums including Tall, Dark, and Handcuffed (2001) and Maryland Mansions (2004) demonstrate an ability to combine formal electronic experimentation with personal, often confessional lyrical content. He has worked under various aliases and in different genres across his career, maintaining an independent and restless creative practice.

Dale Cornish is a British musician and artist based in London working with electronics, performance, and text. His music ranges from abstract electronic compositions to more direct, melodic forms, maintaining throughout a personal aesthetic that resists easy genre classification. He has released on Pan Records, Entr'acte, and other labels, and has collaborated with visual artists and musicians across experimental contexts. His practice moves fluidly between music-making, writing, and performance, refusing specialization in favor of an open and often playful investigation.

William Cobbing is a British sculptor, filmmaker, and performance artist born in 1974 in London, where he continues to live and work. He studied at Central Saint Martins and De Ateliers, Amsterdam, and holds a PhD by practice from Middlesex University. Clay is central to his practice, with themes of metamorphosis, entropy, and the dissolution of body and earth. He has held residencies at Turquoise Mountain in Kabul and the British School at Rome, and his work has been exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery, Hayward Gallery, Tate Liverpool, and Camden Arts Centre.

Scorn is the project of Mick Harris (born 1967), formerly drummer of Napalm Death and Painkiller. Following his departure from Napalm Death in 1991, Harris developed Scorn as a vehicle for heavily processed dub and drum and bass, bringing the physical weight of extreme metal into electronic music. Albums on Earache and Earache subsidiary labels including Vae Solis (1992), Evanescence (1994), and Gyral (1995) established Scorn as a foundational project in post-industrial bass music. Harris's production — dense sub-bass pressure, skeletal drum machine programming, and cavernous reverb — influenced a generation of dark electronic producers, from Techno Animal to Burial.

Born in Hilversum in 1970, Edwin van der Heide studied Music Technology in Utrecht and Sonology at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. He was a co-founding member of the performance group Sensorband, alongside Zbigniew Karkowski and Atau Tanaka, and has since developed an expansive practice in sound installation and spatial composition that incorporates laser, real fog, and multi-channel audio systems. His work has been shown at the Reina Sofía in Madrid, the MAXXI in Rome, and Art Basel. In 2015 he received the Composition Prize of the Beethoven Foundation in Bonn. He teaches and researches at Leiden University.

P.A.S. — Planetary Assault Systems — is the techno alias of British producer Luke Slater, under which he has released some of his most uncompromising electronic music. Characterised by relentless high-energy patterns, industrial textures, and a refusal of melodic concession, the project represents the hardest, most structurally concentrated end of Slater's range, exploring techno as physical and psychological intensity rather than pleasure. Releases on Ostgut Ton and Mote-Evolver have built one of the most powerful bodies of work in contemporary techno, a severity that has made Planetary Assault Systems a reference point for producers working at techno's harder, industrial edges.

The Gerogerigegege was founded by Juntaro Yamanouchi in 1985, performing noise sets in BDSM clubs in Japan. Over the years, The Gerogerigegege has included many members, probably one of the most notable and consistent, other than Yamanouchi being Gero 30, was Tetsuya Endoh, aka Gero 56, an exhibitionist known to masturbate onstage during live performances. Yamanouchi is known for releasing records with unusual concepts, such as 1989’s “Showa”, which features a recording of people having sex to “Kimigayo”, the Japanese national anthem.

A New York-based curator and writer, she joined the Museum of Modern Art in 1970 and went on to found its video collection and exhibition programs, overseeing the acquisition of more than 500 media art works across four decades. She organized early solo presentations of Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, Joan Jonas, Laurie Anderson, and Gary Hill, and was among the first curators in the United States to present work by Chinese video artists. She taught at Yale and Columbia and published Video/Art: The First Fifty Years, a history of the medium.

Atle Selnes Nielsen is a Norwegian sound artist and musician active in experimental and improvised music contexts. Based in Norway, his practice engages with the acoustic and electronic dimensions of sound, contributing to the active Scandinavian scene of experimental music that has flourished particularly since the 1990s.

Working in solo and collaborative settings, Nielsen explores the acoustic properties of instruments and spaces, often combining acoustic sound sources with electronics in performances and recordings that foreground listening as an active and transformative practice.

Julián Carrillo (1875–1965) was a Mexican composer and one of the leading twentieth-century exponents of microtonal music, which he developed under the name Sonido 13 (Sound 13) — music using intervals smaller than the semitone or half step. Born in Ahualulco, San Luis Potosí, of indigenous descent, he studied at the National Conservatory of Mexico and later in Leipzig and Ghent, where he developed the theoretical and practical foundations for his microtonal system.

From the 1920s onward, he conducted intensive investigations into the possibilities of microtonal intervals, working with sixteenth tones, which he considered the smallest interval listeners could readily hear.

Victoria Pham is an Australian interdisciplinary artist and evolutionary biologist based in Paris who holds a PhD in biological anthropology from the University of Cambridge, specialising in bioacoustics and acoustic mapping. Her sound practice weaves electronic composition, decolonial inquiry, and ecological listening, and she is represented by the Australian Music Centre as an Associate Artist. With artist James Nguyen she produced RE:SOUNDING, a project engaging the Vietnamese Đông Sơn drum that commissioned musicians globally and assembled an open-access library of fifty-one recorded drum sounds from the archive.

Born in Debica, Poland on 23 November 1933, he studied at the State Academy of Music in Krakow and came to international attention in 1960 with Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, scored for 52 string instruments and deploying tone clusters, glissandi, and percussive bowing to push the orchestra toward noise. He later shifted toward a neo-Romantic idiom in works including the St Luke Passion and Polish Requiem. He received four Grammy Awards, the Wolf Prize in Arts in 1987, and the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition in 1992. He died in Krakow on 29 March 2020.

Born in 1967 in Aachen, Germany, he trained as a bookseller before studying musicology, German studies, and economics in Cologne. He worked for years as a freelance music journalist and critic in Berlin, contributing to publications including Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik, MusikTexte, and Frieze, and taught at TU Berlin and the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music. From 2015 to 2022 he served as artistic director of the Donaueschingen Musiktage, one of the most important festivals for new music in the world. He is also an editor for new music at SWR Stuttgart.

Hans Reichel (1949–2011) was a German improviser and instrument builder from Hagen. He built his own guitars — including the daxophone, a wooden instrument played with a bow that produces vocalised sounds — and developed an idiosyncratic approach to extended string performance. Releasing primarily on FMP (Free Music Production), his recordings are simultaneously abstract and lyrical, technically extraordinary and intuitively musical. His daxophone attracted widespread interest and collaboration. He also built custom fretless guitars and instruments from found materials, treating lutherie as a compositional practice.

Born in Lima in 1931 and died there in 2012, this Peruvian composer was a foundational figure in Latin American electroacoustic music. After studying at the Manhattan School of Music and the RCA Institute of Electronic Technology, he joined CLAEM at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires in 1963, where he built the studio's first electronic music laboratory and composed Intensidad y Altura (1964), the centre's first tape piece, based on a poem by César Vallejo. He later explored computer-generated music in his ESEPCO series from 1970.

Putri Hijau is an Indonesian singer, entertainer, internet personality, and snake performer. An incomparable mix of character design, social provocation, gender discomfort, and political rebellion, using songs, voice, feedback, risk, and extreme volume as tools for public disruption and animated performance. Putri Hijau overexposes confrontational performances that challenge social norms and expectations. Putri Hijau’s appearances interlink the “grotesque” (Bataille) where excess, transgression, eroticism, and the abject function as mediums to break societal norms and achieve a kind of “sovereignty” or pure experience beyond reason and utility.

Born in Helsinki in 1965, he is a Finnish filmmaker and visual artist whose work moves between documentary, expanded cinema, and gallery installation. His 1998 film Futuro: A New Stance for Tomorrow chronicled the rise and fall of a prefabricated house design that became an emblem of postwar technological optimism in Finland. The Future Is Not What It Used To Be (2002) and Optical Sound (2005) further developed his interests in technology, time, and collective memory. He received the Ars Fennica Award in 2015 and has shown work at Documenta (2012), the Venice Biennale (2017), and Berlin Biennale (2004).

British-Lebanese artist born in 1985, he holds a doctorate from the University of London on sound's role in legal investigation and calls himself a Private Ear. His practice uses audio forensics—speech analysis, audio ballistics, acoustic reconstruction—to document human rights violations. He contributed audio-ballistic analysis in the 2014 killing of two Palestinian teenagers in the West Bank and built an acoustic record of the Saydnaya military prison in Syria. He won the Turner Prize in 2019 jointly with Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo, and Tai Shani, and in 2023 founded Earshot, the first body dedicated to deploying sound in defence of human and environmental rights.

Eberhard Blum (1940–2020) was a German flautist who became one of the central interpreters of new music in the second half of the twentieth century. Based in New York for many years, he premiered and recorded works by many major composers, including John Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, and Toshi Ichiyanagi. His editions and recordings for hat ART, Wergo, and other labels document a lifetime of commitment to the most demanding contemporary repertoire. He was also a key collaborator with Cage, participating in many of his most important later performances and recordings.

Alchemic Harm is a Berlin-based raw and ritualistic ambient project, the work of Peter Kirn, a writer and musician also known for leading the music technology platform CDM and the MusicMakers Hacklab. The project explores dystopian themes through industrial and techno-inflected soundscapes, building environments that process environmental and societal anxiety through electronic means. The self-titled debut EP was released in 2017 and expanded into a full-length album on the Instruments of Discipline label. Live work has included appearances at Contort and Collegium Hungaricum. The project sits at the intersection of club music infrastructure and darker conceptual sound practice.

Jason Forrest (also known as Donna Summer) is an American electronic musician and producer working in breakcore and plunderphonics-influenced sample culture. Releasing on Cock Rock Disco and other labels, his music deploys dense, humorous, and often disorienting collages of pop samples, heavy metal, and electronic beats into unpredictable assemblages. Albums including The Unrelenting Songs of the 1979 Post Disco Crash (2003) and Shamelessly Exciting (2005) demonstrated a keen satirical intelligence within the noise and breakcore underground. He has also worked as a DJ and label curator, championing music at the intersection of noise and dance culture.

Born in Melbourne in 1981, Anthea Caddy is an Australian cellist who divides her time between Melbourne and Berlin. Her practice combines extended technique with a deep engagement with electroacoustic music, field recording, and free improvisation, treating the cello as a source of texture, noise, and micro-tonal detail. She has performed with Tony Conrad, Christian Wolff, Magda Mayas, Annette Krebs, Philip Samartzis, and Robin Hayward, among many others. Her long-term duo with sound artist Thembi Soddell, documented on the Cajid label, is a central strand of her collaborative work. The trio recording Thread with Annette Krebs and Magda Mayas appeared on Another Timbre.

A visual and audio artist, designer, and researcher from Mexico, she pursues a PhD in Communication, New Media, and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. Her practice centres on audiovisual work including live coding, which she uses to develop languages for live visual music. She is co-founder of Andamio, a platform that brings together text, visuals, and sound to explore visual music, electronic literature, and video experimentation through live coding. Verifiable biographical details beyond her Mexican origin and current academic affiliation are limited in publicly available sources.

Dr. Nexus is a Berlin-based project working across noise, industrial and free improvisation, with a practice that extends into sound art, installation and live performance carried out with a punk-derived, do-it-yourself attitude.

In 2009 Dr. Nexus joined the Berlin duo Vinyl Terror & Horror — Camilla Sørensen and Greta Christensen, known for sound sculptures built from dismantled turntables and sliced vinyl — under the joint name Noizemashine Tour Truckers for the release Unloading. Dr. Nexus's work has also been presented at Berlin's MILKandLEAD gallery, as part of the Deliquium series in 2018, and circulates through Bandcamp and SoundCloud alongside other DIY noise output.

Marina Rosenfeld (b. 1968) is an American composer and sound artist whose practice explores the spatial, social, and perceptual dimensions of sound through installation, performance, and composition. She is best known for her sheer frost orchestra — a project in which electric guitarists, using nail polish as a preparation, collectively produce an expansive ambient drone whose character is set by the configuration of players in each performance. Later works, including Teenage Lontano and the P.A. sound system pieces staged at the Park Avenue Armory, extend this into amplified, site-specific contexts treating sound and voice as spatial and social phenomena.

Nele Möller is a Brussels-based artist working in sound, performance, and writing. Her research-based practice centres on field recording, listening, forest conversations, and the historical inscription of nature in sound. She performs under the pseudonym Kimberly Clark — releasing on Futura Resistenza and RDS Rec — and co-runs the Futura Resistenza label with Frédéric Van de Velde. She produces the ongoing radio series Listening Fields at Radio Panik, Brussels. She is currently pursuing a PhD in the Arts at KU Leuven and LUCA School of Arts, where her work engages with acoustic ecology and critical listening as artistic and political modes.

Mexican sound artist and electronics developer whose practice centres on the relationship between living systems, biological processes, and sound. She co-founded the electronic media collective DreamAddictive in Tijuana in 2003, the activist group Astrovandalistas in Mexico City in 2011, and the bioart collective Interspecifics in 2013. Her project Pulsu(m) Plantae uses custom biofeedback devices to translate the electrical signals of plants into live sound via analog synthesis. Her work has been presented internationally through residencies, exhibitions, and concerts, and she has written extensively on sonic ecologies and interspecies listening as artistic and political practice.

Tiny Tim (born Herbert Buckingham Khaury, 1932–1996) was an American singer, musician, and entertainer whose falsetto voice, long hair, ukulele playing, and deep knowledge of American popular song made him a singular figure in twentieth-century popular culture. Performing a repertoire drawn largely from vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, and early popular music, he embodied an archival and revivalist impulse that was simultaneously sincere and irreducibly strange. His 1968 hit Tiptoe Through the Tulips brought him to mainstream TV, but his practice was more complex than novelty suggested — musical archaeology combined with a flamboyant persona blurring sincere devotion and theatrical spectacle.

ABADIR (Rami Abadir) is a Cairo-born music producer, sound designer, and writer active in experimental, glitch, and ambient music. Based in Egypt, he is one half of the collaborative duo 0N4B and a co-founder, alongside visual artists Nurah Farahat and Islam Shabana, of Mapping Possibilities — an audio-visual collective dedicated to promoting A/V events and cross-disciplinary practice since 2016.

His solo work has appeared on labels including Hush Hush Records, Yerevan Tapes, Kaer'Uiks, and D.M.T. Records. As 0N4B he has released on Kaer'Uiks, ANBA, and Aural Electronics, with recordings that navigate the territories between noise, ambient texture, and glitch construction.

V. Vale is an American publisher and writer, founder of RE/Search Publications in San Francisco, which has produced foundational books on industrial culture, noise music, and transgressive art since 1980. RE/Search's titles — including volumes on Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, and Incredibly Strange Films — have served as essential reference points for generations of underground cultural practitioners.

Vale founded Search and Destroy, the San Francisco punk fanzine, in 1977, which documented the early punk scene and established his commitment to interview-based, deeply researched journalism about marginal culture.

Based in Basel, he is a Swiss musician, DJ, and central figure in the city's experimental music scene. He co-founded the Klappfon concert series dedicated to experimental music and initiated the Trinational Network Transborder, connecting experimental arts communities across the Swiss, French, and German border region. For over a decade he performed with MIR, a Basel trio whose sound was described as dance music for Klingons, situated between industrial, krautrock, and noise, releasing their final record WM in 2021. He also runs the Plattfon record store in Basel, known for its collection of industrial, noise, and underground music.

Richard Francis is a New Zealand sound artist based in Auckland. He runs CMR (Copy for Your Records), an important label documenting contemporary experimental and electroacoustic music from New Zealand and internationally, with releases by artists including Phil Julian, Bruce Russell, Antoine Chessex and Tim Coster.

His own compositional work uses electronics, field recordings and processed acoustic material to create carefully structured, often minimal compositions that reflect a sustained engagement with the perceptual and spatial dimensions of sound.

Curtis Roads is an American composer and researcher who has made fundamental contributions to the development of granular synthesis and computer music since the 1970s. His theoretical work — especially Microsound (2001) — laid the groundwork for understanding the sonic implications of working with extremely short time-scale sound particles. His compositions, including work released on MIT Press and Asphodel Records, apply these techniques to create shimmering, complex textures of considerable beauty and intellectual density. He teaches at UC Santa Barbara and remains a key figure in computer music.

Manni Dee is a British electronic musician based in London. His productions combine industrial techno, noise, and power electronics in a framework that retains rhythmic structure while pushing into abrasive sonic territory. He releases on Perc Trax and other industrial-adjacent techno labels, and has performed at Berghain and major European techno venues. His approach is informed by British rave culture, hardcore, and the legacy of industrial music, and he is associated with a strand of UK techno that maintains politically engaged and sonically extreme positions while engaging with club contexts.

A self-taught artist from Leh, Ladakh, his practice moves through sound art, analog photography, and experimental filmmaking, drawing on local memory, mythos, and poetics rooted in his remote homeland. Active across cross-genre projects since 2015, his early noise performances across India were noted as abrasive interventions in the underground circuit. His 2023 debut album Fatima, released on the label Danse Noire, draws on ambient, drone, noise, and power electronics to trace lived experiences in Ladakh, and is accompanied by a 48-page photo book. Collaborators on the release include Dis Fig and Elvin Brandhi.

The Selecter are a British ska revival band from Coventry, formed in 1979 as part of the 2 Tone movement alongside The Specials and Madness. Led by Pauline Black, whose powerfully charismatic stage presence and vocal control made her one of the defining figures of the scene, the band produced sharp, danceable ska-punk with politically engaged lyrics addressing racism, unemployment, and Thatcherite Britain. Their debut single On My Radio and the album Too Much Pressure (1980) on 2 Tone Records are foundational documents of the British ska revival. The band dissolved and reformed several times; Black has remained the consistent centre of gravity.

Born in Odesa in 1944 and raised in Austria, he studied medicine and mathematics in Vienna before joining the Viennese Actionists in the mid-1960s and developing a post-conceptual practice spanning video, virtual reality, and digital art. He directed Ars Electronica from 1992 to 1995 and became director of ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in 1999, building it into one of the world's most significant media art institutions. A prolific theorist and curator, he shaped discourse around new media across five decades. He died in March 2023.

Biosphere is the alias of Geir Jenssen (born 1962), a Norwegian electronic musician and producer from Tromsø. A pioneer of ambient electronic music in the 1990s, he developed a sound characterised by long, slow evolving textures, sparse beats, and field recordings, drawing on Arctic landscapes and science fiction imagery. Substrata (1997) is widely regarded as a landmark of ambient music, building sustained drone environments from minimal material over extended durations. He has released extensively on Apollo/R&S and his own Biophon label, and has collaborated with Røyksopp. His work is closely tied to notions of northern geography, isolation, and the aesthetics of vast, cold space.

Co-founder of Viennese Actionism alongside Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Brus began with abstract painting before turning to extreme body-based performance in the early 1960s. His first self-painting (Selbstbemalung) took place in 1964. His 1968 action Art and Revolution, in which he simultaneously defecated and sang the Austrian national anthem, led to a six-month prison sentence he avoided by fleeing to Berlin, returning to Austria only in 1976. A permanent gallery, the Bruseum, at the Joanneum in Graz is dedicated to his work.

Makoto Oshiro is a Japanese sound artist and performer who has developed a distinctive practice centered on close listening, extended improvisation, and the investigation of acoustic phenomena in specific physical and social settings. Based in Japan and active internationally, his work often engages with the subtle and overlooked sounds of everyday environments, transforming attentive listening into a compositional and performative act.

He has performed at festivals and in venues associated with experimental and improvised music in Japan and internationally, and has collaborated with musicians and sound artists across different traditions.

Julian Oliver is a New Zealand-born critical engineer and artist based in Berlin, active internationally since 1996. His practice spans network art, software art, creative hacking, data forensics, counter-surveillance, and information visualisation, consistently interrogating the politics of technological infrastructure through direct intervention. He manipulates routers, captures data from open wireless networks, augments commercial billboards, sonifies social media streams, and otherwise uses networks as artistic material.

Born Daigo Yamashita on 18 January 1989 in Singapore, he is a Japanese musician, singer-songwriter, and performer who fuses rockabilly, blues, and traditional Japanese musical sensibility into a style he calls Samurai Rock 'n' Roll. He began playing in Tokyo at the age of eighteen after first encountering rock and roll in junior high school, and released his debut CD Jeana for Young in 2011. He has since performed internationally across Japan, Europe, Asia, and the United States with his backing band, completing four studio albums.

S.E. Rogie (Sooliman Ernest Rogie, 1926–1994) was a Sierra Leonean guitarist and singer, a foundational figure in palm wine music — a form of acoustic guitar-based popular music developed in West Africa from the 1920s. Rogie recorded prolifically from the 1950s onward, developing a highly personal guitar style and a smooth, intimate vocal delivery that set him apart from other palm wine guitarists. His albums, including The Palm Wine Sounds of S.E. Rogie (1966), were released in Sierra Leone and later distributed internationally through Rounder and Cooking Vinyl. He moved to the US and then the UK in later life, where he was rediscovered before his death.

Venezuelan experimental musician raised in Caracas and later based in Los Angeles, who moved to Miami in 1996 and then to New York in 2000, where he founded No Fun Fest in 2004, establishing it as the leading international noise festival of its era. Working with modular synthesizers, computer software, and found objects, he has collaborated with Merzbow, Thurston Moore, Zeena Parkins, and Prurient. He subsequently moved into sound design for the video game industry, contributing to projects including League of Legends and South Park.

Schacke is a Danish producer based in Copenhagen. His music moves through industrial techno and experimental electronic production, with a sound that draws from both Northern European minimalism and harsher American industrial traditions. He releases on his own Hessle Audio-affiliated circle and international techno labels, and has been featured on NTS Radio and other platforms. His productions maintain a tonal darkness and formal rigour that distinguish them within contemporary techno contexts. He is part of an active Copenhagen experimental and club music community.

An American sound artist and MFA graduate of Bard College's Milton Avery School, his practice spans performance, installation, and writing. His ongoing project Underperformances investigates architectural acoustics through the interaction of microphone, mixer, loudspeakers, and his own body within resonant rooms. Drawing on research in anechoic chambers and underwater acoustics, his work traces spatial intensities flowing between humans, nonhumans, and built structures. His work has been presented at the Studio Museum in Harlem, HKW Berlin, ISSUE Project Room Brooklyn, and Inter Arts Center Malmö.

Dj Sniff (Takuro Mizuta Lippit) is a Tokyo-born DJ and sound artist based in Amsterdam. Working as a turntablist in free improvisation and contemporary experimental music contexts, he treats the turntable as an acoustic instrument rather than a playback device, using contact microphones, preparations, and physical manipulation of records to produce sounds well outside conventional DJ practice. He was based at the STEIM institute in Amsterdam, where he worked on instrument development. He has collaborated with Tetuzi Akiyama, Christof Kurzmann, and many others in the international free improvisation scene.

Luis Chispas is an Iberian experimental artist whose work circulates through small-edition releases and underground venues in Spain and Portugal. His recordings combine electronics, field-recorded material and free improvisation, with a consistent concern for raw texture, unprocessed residue and the sonic behaviour of materials and spaces treated as found rather than arranged.

The project exists on the productive fringes of the Iberian noise and experimental scene — a network of practitioners, labels and venues that has developed its own distinct character within the broader European underground.

DVS1 (Zak Khutoretsky) is an American techno DJ and producer working between Minneapolis and Berlin, widely regarded as one of the most technically accomplished and culturally serious practitioners in contemporary techno. His DJ sets — long, patient constructions developing over hours — reflect deep knowledge of the Detroit, Chicago, and Berlin traditions and a thorough understanding of collective listening. His productions on 3024 and his own Hush label carry the same precision as his live work. Beyond music, DVS1 has been a significant voice in critical discussions of DJ economics, founding the royalty-sharing platform Aslice in 2022 to narrow the pay gap between DJs and producers.

Arcangel Constantini is a Mexican artist and musician based in Mexico City whose practice encompasses circuit bending, video glitch art, net art, and performance. He is a key figure in Latin American digital art, recognized for his innovative manipulation of consumer electronics and his pioneering contributions to glitch aesthetics across sound and image.

Constantini gained early international recognition for his circuit bending practice — the creative short-circuiting of low-cost electronic toys and devices to produce unpredictable sonic and visual results.

Founded in Los Angeles in 1999, the project centres on John Wiese alongside long-running collaborator Charlie Mumma and an expanded cast of participants. Since their self-titled 2001 debut on Chondrotic Sound, they have released hundreds of recordings across formats and labels — including Hospital Productions, Wiese's own Helicopter imprint, and Gilgongo Records — encompassing harsh noise, noisecore, grindcore, free improvisation, and musique concrète. The prolific and deliberately unstable output treats grindcore as a conceptual chassis rather than a fixed genre, shooting tangents toward the outer limits of sonic extremity and, more recently, fragile electro-acoustic collage.

Born in Moscow in 1977, he is an artist, improviser, and label founder whose practice moves between electroacoustic music, noise, glitch, actionism, and Fluxus-influenced approaches. He plays analogue synthesizers, electromagnetic devices, and light-controlled electronics, processing everything in real time, and uses field recordings as compositional material. In 2005 he founded Mikroton Recordings in Moscow, a label dedicated to experimental and electroacoustic improvisation that ran until 2025 and issued collaborations with Keith Rowe, Gunter Muller, and Norbert Moslang among many others.

Christian Bök is a Canadian poet and sound artist born in 1966 in Toronto. His Eunoia (2001) — in which each chapter uses only one vowel — won the Griffin Poetry Prize and became one of the most celebrated Canadian poetry books of the decade. His practice also encompasses sound poetry and performance, including The Xenotext project, in which he has worked to encode a poem into the genome of Deinococcus radiodurans, a bacterium that can survive radiation. He has performed internationally as a sound poet and has published on the poetics of pataphysics, the lettrists, and other avant-garde traditions.

Mike Patton (b. 1968) is an American vocalist and composer whose practice spans a vast range of genres. Best known as the vocalist of Faith No More — whose 1992 album Angel Dust remains one of the most formally adventurous records in mainstream rock — he has sustained a parallel career via projects including Mr. Bungle, Tomahawk, Fantômas, Peeping Tom, and Mondo Cane. As a solo artist he has worked with figures from Zorn to Björk. His approach to the voice as an instrument — extending its range through noise, extended technique, and genre-shifting — is most explicit on the solo album Adult Themes for Voice (1996), composed entirely of vocal sounds, and on his work via his label Ipecac.

Born in Seoul in 1976, Hong Chulki co-founded Astronoise with Choi Joonyong in 1997, the first Korean live noise act, and the label Balloon and Needle in 2000. He began exploring turntables and other playback devices as instruments in the early 2000s, developing a cartridge-less technique that treats the turntable as a sound-generating object rather than a record player. His practice centres on collective non-idiomatic improvisation, and he has collaborated with Ryu Hankil, Jin Sangtae, Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M., Jason Kahn, and Zbigniew Karkowski. He has also composed soundtracks for Korean experimental film, including work with the production company Goksa.

Franco Mattes (b. 1974), working with Eva Mattes as 0100101110101101.org, is an Italian net artist and provocateur whose practice occupies the intersection of net art, performance, and institutional critique. Their early works included the acquisition and modification of websites, the spreading of computer viruses, and live performances in online environments including Second Life exploring identity and community in virtual space. Works including No Fun (2010) — in which Franco appeared to hang himself on a live-stream platform, generating genuine emergency responses from viewers who believed it was real — test the boundaries between art, life, and audience complicity online.

Born in Alexandria in 1924, Soliman Gamil was an Egyptian composer, qanun player, and musicologist who dedicated his career to reconstructing the music of ancient Egypt. He studied composition at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris and won national and international prizes, including awards from Leipzig and the Critics Society in London. From 1963 he composed for film and theatre using reconstructed Pharaonic instruments — harps, flutes, lyres, and percussion — built from archaeological and iconographic evidence. In 1969 he founded the Egyptian Folkloric Music Orchestra, affiliated to the Ministry of Culture. He died in 1994.

San Francisco-based sound artist and acoustician who studied composition at Mills College and has worked since 1979 across solo projects and group configurations. From 1983 he collaborated with Suzanne Dycus as Crawling with Tarts, producing a substantial cassette catalogue through the 1980s and 1990s. His professional work in machinery vibration isolation and environmental noise informs a practice focused on infrasound, microvibration, and psychoacoustics. He uses accelerometers to translate the sonic activity of buildings into site-specific compositions of extreme quietude and precision.

Von Magnet is a French experimental and industrial music project formed in the 1980s, led by Brendan Perry collaborator and multi-instrumentalist Xavier Boussiron alongside a rotating cast of collaborators. Working in industrial, dark ambient, and neo-folk territories, they have released on Les Disques du Soleil et de l'Acier and other French underground labels. Their music combines electronics, percussion, and acoustic instruments in dense, ritualistic compositions that engage with European dark traditions. They have been associated with the French industrial underground and with artists including Dead Can Dance.

László Hortobágyi (born 1956) is a Hungarian musician, composer, and ethnomusicologist who has developed a practice integrating traditional music from India, Tibet, and other Asian traditions with electronic processing and composition. Releasing on Doyen and other labels, he has produced a large body of work that approaches world music synthesis from a genuinely deep ethnomusicological foundation, rather than mere stylistic appropriation. His Ananda Shankar Projects and collaborations with Indian classical musicians alongside his electronic compositional output make him an unusual and serious figure in the global music synthesis tradition.

Joshua Weitzel (born 1989, Kassel) is a German musician, curator, and researcher. Working with guitar, shamisen, and extended techniques, he spans improvisation, electroacoustic composition, installation, and field recording. He completed a PhD at the University of Edinburgh on sound art at documenta (1955–1992) and is an artistic associate at Hochschule für Musik Mainz. He runs the Chamäleon Konzerte series in Kassel — recipient of the city's Kulturförderpreis (2020) — and has released on gruenrekorder, 577 Records, and Off. Collaborators include Eddie Prévost, Massimo Magee, and Ken Ikeda.

Nicolas Wiese is a German sound artist and video artist based in Berlin. His practice combines live video manipulation, real-time image processing and electronic sound performance, working at the intersection of audiovisual improvisation and structural composition. Sound and image are treated as parallel materials subject to the same operations of transformation, fragmentation and layering — neither is merely illustrative of the other.

He performs frequently in audiovisual duo and ensemble contexts, often in collaboration with improvising musicians from Berlin's extended experimental scene, bringing a compositional sensibility shaped by both moving image editing and electroacoustic music.

Born in Marseille in 1951, he is a French composer and co-founder of the Groupe de musique expérimentale de Marseille in 1968. He pioneered underwater concert music, staging the first underwater performance in San Diego Bay in 1982 with Sonic Waters, in which the audience listened while submerged. He later directed the Centre International de Recherche Musicale and the MANCA festival in Nice until 1998. His electroacoustic works have been commissioned by the GRM and realized in venues across Europe and North America. In 2002 he founded Audionaute, a studio specializing in sound design for cultural spaces and multimedia scenography.

Éric la Casa is a French field recordist and sound artist based in Paris. His practice is focused on the acoustic capture of urban environments — particularly the architectural and social soundscapes of Paris and other cities — with a documentary precision and compositional sensibility. He releases on his own Swarming imprint and other labels including Unfathomless and Bruit, and has collaborated with Jean-Luc Guionnet and others. His Radio Fragments series and recordings of specific Paris locations are central works in the field recording genre, treating the urban acoustic environment with the attention usually reserved for music composition.

American multimedia artist, photographer, writer, and animator who studied journalism at NYU and art history at the Sorbonne in Paris, and has spent much of her career living and working in Europe and Asia. Her practice investigates what she calls the augmented realities of disappearing worlds, using photography, video, audio, and writing. Her 2016 book A Glacier's Requiem was published with an accompanying vinyl record of recordings of melting glaciers. From 2003 to 2008 she documented life at New York's Hotel Chelsea, and her book Spirits and Ghosts: Journeys through Mongolia was published by powerHouse Books in 2003.

Conlon Nancarrow (1912–1997) was an American-Mexican composer who spent most of his career in Mexico City, where he composed an extraordinary series of Studies for Player Piano — over fifty works punched directly onto pianola rolls and unperformable by human hands. These studies explore irrational tempos, complex polyrhythm, and simultaneous tempos with a rigorous and playful imagination that makes them both intellectually overwhelming and viscerally exciting. Recorded and released by 1750 Arch Records in the 1980s, they influenced a generation of composers including György Ligeti.

Launched in 2018 by Swedish conceptual artist Jonas Lund, the Jonas Lund Token (JLT) is an artwork in which the artist created 100,000 shares in his own artistic practice, each represented by an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain. Token holders become members of his board of trustees, with one token equalling one vote on strategic decisions concerning his career. By relinquishing majority control, the work deliberately subverts the traditional power structures governing the contemporary art world, turning speculation and corporate governance into artistic material and distributing artistic autonomy outward.

Aya (Aya Sinclair) is a British experimental electronic producer who has emerged as one of the most significant voices in UK experimental music in recent years. She previously produced under the alias LOFT, gaining recognition for challenging, visceral music rooted in her Yorkshire upbringing and explorations of queer identity, substance use, and the desire to escape social expectations.

Her move to the Hyperdub label and the subsequent albums Im hole (2021) and hexed! (2022) brought wide critical attention.

Formed in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1980, the group—centred on Mark Hosler, Don Joyce, Richard Lyons, and David Wills—built a practice out of audio collage, found sound, and media critique. Don Joyce hosted the long-running radio show Over the Edge on KPFA. In 1991 their U2 EP, a parody splicing Casey Kasem outtakes over the band's music, provoked a lawsuit from Island Records that became a landmark case in debates around sampling and fair use, documented in their 1995 book Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2.

Falon Cañón is a Colombian sound and noise artist based in Bogotá, identified as a central figure in the city's experimental noise scene. Her practice involves building machines from waste circuits, motors, and technological scrap, using these devices to produce improvised noise compositions that engage with consumerism, waste, and saturation as critical themes. Her work articulates an aesthetic of degradation — machines that interact with viewers through sound, light, and movement rather than passive contemplation. She is part of Trilobite alongside Carlos Bonil. Her exhibition Ruido Negro was presented at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá in 2015.

Stephen Cornford is a British artist and musician based in Edinburgh, known for his work with obsolete and malfunctioning technology. His practice involves feedback systems, modified consumer electronics, and analogue video equipment — exploring the sounds and images produced when technology fails or is pushed beyond its intended function. He has released music on Consumer Waste and other independent labels, and has exhibited video and sound installation work in gallery contexts. His practice connects to the British tradition of live electronics and the broader international interest in the aesthetics of malfunction and machine agency.

Selten Gehörte Musik ("Rarely Heard Music") was a free improvisation ensemble active from 1973 to 1978, based primarily in Stuttgart and Berlin. Its members — Dieter Roth, Gerhard Rühm, Oswald Wiener, H.C. Artmann and Dominik Steiger — were primarily writers, poets and visual artists who had emerged from the Vienna Group and related Austrian literary avant-gardes of the 1950s and '60s, and who came together to improvise without formal musical training or methodology.

The group met monthly at members' homes — particularly in Roth's houses in Stuttgart, Berlin and elsewhere — to improvise collectively with piano, voice, toy instruments, household objects and whatever materials were at hand.

Aho Ssan is the alias of Paris-based artist Niamké Désiré. An autodidact composer after studying mathematics, computer science, graphic design and cinema at Université d'Orsay, he creates dense, cinematic electronic and electroacoustic works using custom digital instruments, Max/MSP patches and synthesizers. His debut album Simulacrum (2020, Subtext Recordings) draws on Jean Baudrillard's ideas of simulation and was presented at Berlin Atonal. Inspired by his grandfather's jazz trumpet playing and stories of family memory, his music explores themes of identity, urban alienation, inclusivity versus lived experience as a Black artist in France, and the rhizomatic feeling of everything.

Born Geoffrey Nigel Laurence Rushton in 1962, he co-founded Coil in 1983 with Peter Christopherson. The group became one of the most singular bodies of work in British experimental music, fusing occultism, personal mythology, and dense, often ecstatic electronics. He was responsible for Coil's vocals, lyrics, and chants as well as synthesizers and esoteric instruments. Outside the group he collaborated with Nurse with Wound, Current 93, and Death in June, and produced remixes for Nine Inch Nails. Coil's catalogue, from the industrial noise of Scatology to the ambient beauty of Musick to Play in the Dark, remains widely influential. He died in November 2004.

Born in Grodnau, Austria in 1925, he trained at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts before becoming a central figure in Viennese Actionism during the 1960s. His Material Actions, first staged in 1962 alongside Adolf Frohner and Hermann Nitsch, used the body as canvas and incorporated blood, food, and transgressive ritual in deliberate opposition to conventional painting. In 1972 he founded the Friedrichshof Commune as a post-art social experiment. He was convicted of sexual offences against minors in 1991 and served over six years in prison. He died in Portugal in 2013.

Ghédalia Tazartès (1947–2023) was born into a Judaeo-Spanish family in Paris and developed an extraordinary musical practice that resists all classification. Musician David Fenech described his music as unclassifiable — an assessment confirmed by any encounter with his recordings, which combine pre-linguistic vocal utterances, manipulated field recordings, and tape collage into works of haunting and unsettling beauty.

Tazartès rarely performed in concerts and released a relatively small number of albums during his lifetime, yet he maintained a career making music for dance, theater, and cinema.

Melt Banana are a Japanese noise-pop duo from Tokyo, formed in 1992, comprising vocalist Yasuko Onuki and guitarist Agata. Their practice is built on extreme compression: songs often last under a minute, delivering dense, hyperkinetic guitar noise, electronic treatments, and Onuki's deliberately inhuman vocal delivery at maximum intensity. Their releases — primarily on A-Zap Records and later Skin Graft and Tzadik — established them as singular figures in international noise rock and grindcore adjacent music. They have toured extensively worldwide and collaborated with numerous artists, maintaining a rigorous practice defined by the productive constraints of their chosen format.

Born in Buenos Aires and long based in Berlin, he is a visual arts communicator, video artist, and electronic musician whose practice spans audiovisual performance, experimental club contexts, and curatorial work. In 2004 he co-founded TEKHNE, a collective for audiovisual research, and gave his first solo live performance at Micro Mutek Buenos Aires in 2006. In 2011 he co-founded the techno label Aula Magna Records. His music draws on the intersections between electronic club music and more expansive experimental sound cultures.

Concepción Huerta is a Mexican sound artist, composer, and photographer based in Mexico City. Her practice emerges from careful attention to the sounds of daily routine, objects, and instruments, processed and layered through tape recorder manipulation and tape processing to create atmospheric works that move between ambient and noise. She approaches sound as narrative — building atmospheres of circumstance, emotion, and ideology from dissident or overlooked sonic material — and is interested in how these narratives can become physical and conceptual influences on listeners.

Manrico Montero (1973–2018) was a Mexican sound artist, bioacoustics researcher, and music producer based in Mexico City. He specialised in field recording of Latin American ecosystems — capturing flamingos in the mangroves of Sisal, Yucatán, and the wingbeats of Monarch butterflies using custom-built microphones. He co-founded the Mandorla netlabel (2005) and the ensembles Estructuras de la Tarde and La Orquesta Silenciosa, and released music under the aliases DJ Linga, Karras, and Karras In Dub. He presented his bioacoustics project Semiosis at Mexico's National Phonoteca in 2015. He died on May 21, 2018, from complications during a respiratory procedure in Mexico City.

Swiss-born and Canada-raised sound artist and writer who works with the voice, noise, the body, and endurance as artistic materials. He obtained an MFA from NSCAD and a PhD from the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, and is currently an Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Western Ontario. His audio pieces home in on eye movement, cracking joints, and other incidental sonic matter outside communicative clarity. He co-edited Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language (2001) and published Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body in 2012.

Illusion of Safety is the long-running project of Chicago musician Dan Burke, active since 1983. Working in industrial music, dark ambient, noise, and drone, Burke has produced an enormous and varied output across cassette, vinyl, and digital formats on labels including Malignant, Sterile, and his own Trax imprint. His practice is characterised by a systematic and patient approach to sound construction — layering electronic and processed acoustic material into thick, slowly evolving environments — and has positioned him as one of the more consistent and underappreciated figures in American post-industrial music. He has collaborated with Muslimgauze, Pure, and others.

Solmania is the project of Masahiko Ohno, a Japanese noise musician born in 1958, active in Osaka since the early 1980s. A direct contemporary of Hijokaidan, Incapacitants and Merzbow within the founding generation of Japanese noise music, his primary instruments are homemade multi-necked electric guitars built from salvaged and scrap components — unusual, asymmetrical objects that are as much sculpture as musical instrument — which he plays through heavily distorted amplifiers and effects in extended solo performances of considerable physical intensity.

Trepaneringsritualen is the project of Thomas Martin Ekelund, a Swedish artist working in ritual industrial, power electronics, and dark ambient. The project — whose name references the ancient practice of trepanning — constructs oppressive, liturgical sound environments from noise, electronics, and incantatory vocals, drawing on occultism, thanatology, and transgressive spirituality. Releasing on Cold Meat Industry, Malignant, Hospital, and numerous cassette labels, Ekelund has built an extensive body of work that situates itself within the tradition of Swedish death industrial while maintaining a distinctive ceremonial atmosphere and confrontational intent.

Martin Sorrondeguy (b. 1967) is a Uruguayan-American hardcore punk vocalist, photographer, and filmmaker. Born in Uruguay, his family immigrated to Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood in 1968. As frontman of Los Crudos he sang bilingual lyrics on Latino immigrant identity and social struggle, and founded the DIY label Lengua Armada Discos.

During this period he became one of hardcore punk's first openly gay vocalists, appearing in the 1997 documentary Queercore: A Punk-U-Mentary. In 1998 he formed the straight-edge queercore band Limp Wrist in Philadelphia. He directed the 2004 documentary Beyond the Screams: A U.S. Latino Hardcore Punk Documentary, and his photography appears in his zine Susto.

Born in Bologna in 1990, this Italian composer studied electroacoustic composition and classical guitar at the Conservatorio Giovanni Battista Martini before pursuing research in ethnomusicology and Hindustani classical music. Her work explores consciousness and psychoacoustic perception through modular synthesis and pattern-based repetition. The 2019 album Ecstatic Computation on Editions Mego brought wide attention, and in 2021 she founded her own label light-years. In November 2024 she was appointed Artistic Director of the Music Department at the Venice Biennale for 2025 and 2026.

Born in 1977 in Morelia, Michoacán, Iván Naranjo studied composition at the Las Rosas Conservatory before becoming a composer and improviser working with electroacoustic music, flexible structures, and room acoustics. Part of the electro-acoustic improvisation group Re5i5tol Sooo, his work explores self-similarity and the perceptual effects of assembling different musical materials in space. His compositions have been presented at the Hollywood Bowl, The Ford, and with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and he has an ongoing relationship with the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford. His recordings are released on Mode Records.

Born in New York on 3 October 1936, Steve Reich is an American composer whose discovery of tape phasing — the slow drift of two identical loops out of synchrony — shaped the course of both minimalism and twentieth-century art music. His earliest tape pieces, It's Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966), arose from accidentally asynchronous recorders; he then extended phasing to live performers in Piano Phase (1967). Major later works include Drumming (1971) and Music for 18 Musicians (1976). He studied philosophy at Cornell, composition at Juilliard, and earned a master's degree from Mills College under Darius Milhaud and Luciano Berio.

Born in Prague in 1952 and trained at the Prague School of Graphic Arts and the Institute of Applied Arts, he left Czechoslovakia in 1981 and settled in the United Kingdom. His practice encompasses installation, video, sculpture, and works on paper built around conceptual wit and the repurposing of obsolete or discarded objects — broken pencils, tape recorders, slide projectors — into visual and linguistic propositions. He is Emeritus Professor in Fine Art at Manchester School of Art. He received the Northern Art Prize in 2009 and the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists in 2012.

Pole is the alias of German musician Stefan Betke, born in 1967 in Cologne. His name derives from the defective Waldorf 4-Pole filter whose crackles and hisses became the sonic signature of his first three self-titled albums (1998–2000), released on his own ~scape label. These records, combining dub bass and rhythm structures with digitally processed noise, were foundational to the Berlin minimal and microhouse scenes. Later albums including Steingarten (2007) and Tempelhof (2015) extended this palette. He continues to release and perform, maintaining both his solo practice and the ~scape imprint.

Chik White is the performing name of Darcy Spidle, a Canadian musician and improviser based on the rural Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia whose practice draws on free improvisation and sound art traditions. Working primarily with handmade jaw harps alongside voice, nose flutes, horns, and field recordings of the surrounding land and water, they develop performances characterised by breathwork, sound poetry, and formal unpredictability — events that respond to the specific acoustic conditions of each space and the contingencies of live improvisation. Chik White has released widely and performed across underground circuits in North America and Europe, collaborating with artists such as Bill Nace.

Born in Reykjavik in 1972, she received her BFA from the Iceland University of the Arts in 2001 and her MFA from the Sandberg Institute at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 2005. She is a member of the Dieter Roth Academy. Her practice combines sound installation, performance, drawing, and video, with drawings that function as intermediary translations from sonic events into visual form. She has exhibited at the 56th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2015 as part of the Silver Lining Collateral Event. Her son Matthias Tryggvi Haraldsson is a founding member of the Icelandic performance group Hatari.

Born in 1947 in Lidingö, she is one of Sweden's most celebrated poets, having made her literary debut in 1977 with the collection Den brinnande zeppelinaren. She trained and practised as a physician from 1974 to 1988 before turning to writing full-time, an experience that has left a strong imprint on her work's handling of body, language, and physical sensation. Her 2002 collection Revbensstäderna — The Rib Cities — was awarded the Nordic Council's Literature Prize in 2003. In 2010 she was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Her poetry tests the limits of language through density, physicality, and an attention to lived experience.

Emerging from the streets of Tijuana, Mexico in 1987, Ford Proco began as a noise and soundscape experiment using improvised instruments, found objects, and cassette tape loops. Since 1991 the project has been driven by the duo of Lauro Saavedra and Robert Castañeda, who developed a signature style they call Autoconst through three studio albums — Fragmentos de ocio en el hocico del cerdo (1994), Vértigo de lodo y miel (2000), and Diagrama Percutor (2009). A fourth album, Combustión Alfanumérica, appeared in 2024, its cover art made by Steven Stapleton of Nurse with Wound. Ford Proco is considered a key figure in Mexican industrial electronic music.

Ancient Methods is the project of German producer Michael Wollenhaupt, one of the most prominent figures in industrial techno. Based in Berlin, he established his own Methkin label and developed a sound built on brutally distorted kicks, overdriven percussion, and an industrial density that pushes techno into physically overwhelming territory.

His productions and DJ sets are known for relentless intensity and a refusal of conventional dancefloor accessibility. His label Methkin has released records not only by Ancient Methods but by other producers working in similar sonic territory, establishing an aesthetic identity that prizes extremity.

Wolfgang Voigt (b. 1961, Cologne) is a German producer, composer, and visual artist central to minimal techno and ambient electronic music since the early 1990s. Working under aliases including Gas, Mike Ink, and Love Inc., he combines hypnotic rhythms, dense textures, and conceptual rigor. As co-founder of Kompakt, one of the most influential labels in electronic music, he has shaped the international techno landscape through productions and curatorial work. His Gas project merges orchestral samples with immersive electronic structures, blurring the line between ambient and techno. Through recordings and audiovisual works, he explores perception, memory, and the power of sound.

Anish Kapoor (b. 1954, Mumbai) is an Indian-born British sculptor whose work explores form, void, materiality, and perception on a monumental scale. He studied at Hornsey College of Art and Chelsea School of Art in London and has been based in Britain since the 1970s. He represented Britain at the 1990 Venice Biennale and was awarded the Turner Prize in 1991.

Kapoor's sculptures are often characterized by highly polished concave and convex surfaces that distort and absorb their surroundings, or by deep voids and organic biomorphic forms that create a powerful sense of absence.

Asmus Tietchens (b. 1947, Hamburg) is a German composer who has maintained one of the most prolific and uncompromising practices in electronic music over more than five decades. Beginning with experiments in tape and synthesis in the 1960s, he developed a distinctive approach to sound construction that draws variously on musique concrète, industrial music, ambient, and pure electronic abstraction, while remaining consistently idiosyncratic.

His output spans dozens of albums, ranging from early works on Sky Records in the late 1970s to prolific releases on Hamburgian and international experimental labels.

Musician and theorist born in Bilbao in 1977 who works with noise, free improvisation, and the politics of social dissonance. His practice uses performative estrangement to confront structural alienation, pursued through concerts, writing, and pedagogy. He completed a PhD at the University of the Basque Country under philosopher Ray Brassier in 2017 and has taught at CalArts, Bard, Princeton, and Goldsmiths. With Anthony Iles he co-edited Noise and Capitalism (Arteleku, 2009), and in 2022 Urbanomic published his book Social Dissonance. He is a member of the bands Billy Bao and Regler and has released more than a hundred recordings on labels across Europe, the US, and Japan.

Japanese noise musician born Takushi Yamazaki in 1966 in Miyazu, Kyoto, who launched the Masonna project in Osaka in 1987. The name combines the Japanese words for masochist and woman and doubles as a pun on the pop singer Madonna. Known above all for explosive live performances — destroyed equipment, screaming vocals, feedback-laden electronics, and physical injury — he became a central figure in the international noise scene of the 1990s. John Peel featured him on his BBC radio programme and issued a limited Peel Sessions release. He also records as Space Machine using vintage analog synthesizers and has collaborated with the noise trio Flying Testicle and the supergroup Bustmonster.

Ata Ebtekar, better known as Sote, is an electronic music composer and sound artist based in Tehran. His wide-ranging approach to sound is embodied in diverse paths such as hardcore club sounds, collaborations that straddle (traditional) acoustic and electronic instrumentation, and solo experimental electronics – making Ebtekar equally at home in concert halls, galleries, or clubs. Over the last three decades, he has released on labels such as Warp, Diagonal, SVBKVLT, Sub Rosa, Morphine, and Opal Tapes.

Ground Zero was a Japanese free improvisation and noise ensemble led by Otomo Yoshihide, active from 1990 to 1998. The group's practice was defined by extreme collage — fragments of free jazz, Okinawan folk music, anime soundtracks, noise, and found recordings assembled into chaotic, politically charged performances and records. Their Consume Red (1994) and the live Revolutionary Pekinese Opera (1995) on the RéR and Tzadik labels are among the most confrontational and inventive records of the Japanese experimental scene. The project was deliberately temporary; its dissolution was announced in advance as part of the project's conceptual logic.

A Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist with more than three decades in media arts, Kolgen works as an audiocinetic sculptor, drawing on the relationship between sound and image to build installations, performances, and films driven by autogenerative systems. From 1996 to 2008 he worked primarily as the duo skoltz_kolgen. Solo work has been shown at the Venice Biennale, Ars Electronica, Transmediale, and the Centre Georges Pompidou; he has also performed with Ensemble Intercontemporain and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. His work integrates biophysical and environmental data into spatially immersive audio environments, and he received an honorary mention at Prix Ars Electronica 2005.

Formed in New York in 2010 after a last-minute slot at a Crazy Spirit gig, the band was built around vocalist Hank Wood, whose father drummed in Richard Hell and the Voidoids and whose stepfather was avant-garde jazz saxophonist Rob Brown. The Hammerheads combine snarling garage punk with Latin percussion and a deep R&B groove, the lineup expanding to include organ and congas. Their self-titled debut appeared on the Static Age Musik label, followed by Go Home and Stay Home, each record refining a raw, amphetamine-tension sound that sits between hardcore urgency and the swaggering looseness of New York soul.

J.H. Guraj is the nom de plume of Dominique Vaccaro, a musician active in the field of improvisation on analogue devices, guitar, and reel-to-reel recorders since 2000, based in Bologna. Under the J.H. Guraj alias, Vaccaro offers vibrant, deep, and resonant melodic music that engages with the sonic qualities of strings and electronic tones in sustained improvisational practice.

His work with analogue tape recorders and reel-to-reel machines connects to traditions of extended improvisation that treat the recording apparatus itself as an instrument — with its own timbre, susceptibility to manipulation, and capacity for sonic accident.

Born in Seoul in 1975, he began making music with the electronica project popmusic25 in 1999 before encountering improvised music in 2004 and changing direction. He developed his signature practice working at a South Korean technology market: extracting harsh noise, glitches, and mechanical clatter from exposed hard disk drives, controlling pitch with a stylus. In 2008, inspired by Otomo Yoshihide's Tokyo space GRID605, he founded dotolim, the first dedicated venue for improvised and experimental music in Korea. Since 2015 he has uploaded a one-minute mobile recording daily as the ongoing project Year.

Ian Curtis (1956–1980) was the vocalist and lyricist of Joy Division, the band he co-founded with Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, and Stephen Morris in Salford, England in 1976. His baritone voice, epileptic and convulsive stage presence, and literary lyrics — drawing on J.G. Ballard, Dostoyevsky, and his own psychological deterioration — defined Joy Division's two studio albums, Unknown Pleasures (1979) and Closer (1980), produced by Martin Hannett on Factory Records. He died by suicide at age 23 the night before Joy Division's first North American tour. The remaining members continued as New Order.

Based in the Netherlands, he studied at the interfaculty for image and sound at the Royal Conservatoire and the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. A co-founder of the Rotterdam art collective Telcosystems, he collaborated with Japanese filmmaker Takashi Makino on the film Deorbit in 2013. He also co-founded Baltan Lab in Eindhoven and has long served as director of Sonic Acts, the Amsterdam organisation dedicated to sound art, technology, and ecology, which has run for over thirty years as one of Europe's leading experimental arts platforms.

The Deontic Miracle was a just-intonation live-electronic ensemble led by Catherine Christer Hennix (1948–2023), Swedish composer, mathematician, philosopher, and visual artist. Central Palace Music — a recording from an eight-day festival at the Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm, in 1976, later released by Important Records — features Hennix on Renaissance oboe and sinewave generators alongside Peter Hennix and Hans Isgren. A key figure of the Downtown School alongside La Monte Young and Henry Flynt, Hennix synthesised minimalism, just intonation, mathematical logic, and Sufi spirituality.

Born in New York on February 10, 1942, and died December 2, 2021, he was a central figure in the formation of Conceptual Art in the 1960s, proposing language as a sculptural medium that could travel across cultures without fixed material form. His 1968 Declaration of Intent—stating that a work may be constructed by the artist, fabricated by others, or simply not built at all—became foundational to the movement. Works appeared as wall declarations, printed texts, film, and spoken utterances. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ludwig Museum's Wolfgang Hahn Prize in 2015, and the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation Prize in 2017.

Wisconsin-born Dominick Fernow launched the Prurient project and founded Hospital Productions in 1998 at the age of sixteen, later operating a Hospital Productions record shop in New York City from 2006 to 2011. His recordings span harsh noise, power electronics, black metal, darkwave, and techno, with screamed lyrics exploring violence, isolation, sex, and obsession. He records under numerous aliases including Vatican Shadow and Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement. His mother is the poet and Wisconsin Public Radio host Jean Feraca. Among the most prolific figures in American experimental music, his output spans several hundred releases.

cLOUDDEAD was an experimental hip-hop group comprising Dose One (Adam Drucker), Why? (Yoni Wolf), and Odd Nosdam (David Madson), based in Cincinnati and Oakland, releasing on Anticon in the early 2000s. Their debut double-ten-inch series and self-titled album (2001) produced a form of hip-hop built on fractured imagery, stream-of-consciousness surrealism, and lo-fi electronic production that had little precedent. Ten (2004) continued this approach with greater structural ambition. Their influence on independent and experimental hip-hop was considerable, with each member going on to significant solo work. The project was short-lived but has maintained a devoted audience.

Born in 1954 in Tulln, Austria, Franz Graf studied at the University for Applied Arts Vienna under Oswald Oberhuber and has lived and worked in Vienna ever since. Drawing is the central medium of his practice, though his installations bring together photography, text, audio, and everyday objects to form what he describes as open systems rather than multimedia presentations. Language, font design, and the interplay of figuration and abstraction give his work a distinctive pictorial character that he has developed across four decades. He taught at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 1997 to 2006. Major institutional exhibitions have been held at the Belvedere, Wien Museum, and 21er Haus.

Robert Watts (1923–1988) was an American Fluxus artist, composer, and engineer born in Burlington, Iowa. His work with Fluxus events, multiples, and mail art engaged the movement's interest in dissolving the boundary between art and everyday life. His musical compositions include indeterminate scores and works for unusual means within the Cagean tradition. He taught at Rutgers University for many years and was involved in proto-Fluxus activity before the movement was named. His work is documented in Fluxus archives internationally and has been exhibited in major museum surveys of the movement.

The Ninks are a three-piece punk band formed in Kashiwa City in 2021, built around guitarist-vocalist Fujio and drummer Heidora. Bassist Sepa Takuro joined in 2023, launching the band's full live campaign centred on Shimokitazawa. They describe their sound as Kashiwa City Garlic Punk — a self-coined genre pulling from rock, metal, hardcore and jazz, held together by melodic hooks and extreme stage antics: mid-set whiskey and Tabasco shots are standard. Their first EP, Washing War Machine, arrived digitally in December 2024, followed by debut album Garlic Punk Song Book Vol. 1 in August 2025 — ten tracks accompanied by a feature-length music video.

Attila Faravelli is an Italian sound artist and musician based in Milan whose practice spans electroacoustic improvisation, installation, and experimental performance. His work engages with acoustic phenomena — resonance, feedback, the behavior of physical objects in sonic fields — often using minimal means to generate complex and unpredictable results.

Faravelli is a founding member of A.F. (along with Enrico Malatesta and Alessandro Bosetti in various configurations) and has collaborated with a range of European experimental musicians.

Israeli-American vocalist and electronic musician based in New York, she has been composing and performing electroacoustic music since the mid-1990s using custom Max/MSP programming to process voice and instruments in real time. A faculty member at NYU Steinhardt, she has taught music technology and electronic music performance for over two decades. Collaborators include Luis Tabuenca, Chuck Bettis, and Ras Moshe Burnett. Her multi-channel Audio Chandelier works have been presented across the US, Europe, India, Russia, and the Middle East. A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow in Music Composition, she is also a three-time recipient of grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Elvin Brandhi is a Welsh musician from Bridgend, living nomadically across continents. Working with voice, electronics, and deconstructed sound, her practice creates confrontational, queered noise and experimental music that interrogates the body, language, and performance. She trained in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, releases on Ecstatic Records, and has collaborated with KMRU, Puce Mary, and others. She has performed at Unsound, CTM, Rewire, and Cafe OTO, and held residencies in London and Auckland. Her work exists at the intersection of visceral sound art and political performance.

Born in Athens and raised on post-punk and hardcore in London, he later moved to Berlin where in 2008 he founded PAN, a record label that became central to the intersection of contemporary art and experimental club music. Releasing work under the alias Family Battle Snake, he also produces and DJs, and held a residency at Berghain. He has performed and organized exhibitions at institutions including the Victoria and Albert Museum and Bourse de Commerce. PAN has published records by Yves Tumor, Amnesia Scanner, Anne Imhof, Arca, and Eartheater, among many others.

Born in Moscow in 1987, she grew up between theatre, performance, and DIY fashion before relocating to Israel, where she is now based in Haifa. Under the name Samaya Gorgona she designs psychedelic punk-fetish clothing; as Knoott she records and performs original songs for acoustic guitar and voice alongside more confrontational punk and rave-derived material. In 2017 she co-founded Motor Gang Films and Theatre with cameraman Nikolay Litvinov, producing micro-budget films and staged live music works in the genres of punk, psychedelic, and sentimentalism through 2023.

Alessandra Eramo is an Italian vocalist and sound artist based in Berlin whose practice centers on the voice as a site of physical, political, and poetic investigation. Working with extended vocal techniques, electroacoustics, and multimedia performance, she explores the limits and possibilities of the human voice in live and recorded contexts.

Her performances often involve the transformation of raw vocal sound through electronics, looping, and spatial audio, creating layered environments that move between song, noise, and pure sonic texture.

Kali Malone (b. 1994, Colorado) is a composer based between Stockholm and Paris whose music is built on a foundation of evolving harmonic cycles — patient, focused works that draw out the latent emotional resonances of sustained tones and carefully chosen intervals. Letting go of expectations of duration and breadth, her music creates space for reflection and contemplation.

Her experimental reinterpretations of centuries-old polyphonic compositional methods and historical tuning systems become portals to new ways of perceiving harmony, structure, and introspection.

Sculptor and sound artist based in Paris who trained in wood sculpture at École Boulle before studying plastic and sound creation at Beaux-Arts Paris-Cergy. Ampe works primarily with analog sources — oscillators, filters, drum machines — approaching sound as a medium to be sculpted in real time. In performance, hydrophone recordings, analog synthesizers, tape, and digital processing are reconfigured into dense bursts of abstract noise and rhythmic saturation. Work has been presented at Les Instants Chavirés, Présences Electronique Festival, Sonic Protest Festival, and Centre Pompidou, alongside festivals in Tunisia, Mexico, and elsewhere in Europe.

Eli Kezler is a New York-based percussionist and composer working at the intersection of free improvisation, contemporary composition, and electronics. His practice explores percussion as a vehicle for textural and temporal investigation rather than rhythmic convention, often working with preparations, extended technique, and live electronics. He has released music on NNA Tapes, Northern Spy, and other independent labels, and collaborates widely in the New York experimental music community. His work is informed by his engagement with both the downtown improvisation tradition and more rigorously composed contemporary music.

Born in Alkmaar in 1931, de Vries trained as a gardener before turning to art in the late 1950s. He became associated with the Zero group, alongside Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni, and edited the magazines nul and revue intégration, developing an aleatoric practice in which chance governs the work. From the mid-1970s, natural materials — soil, leaves, juniper berries, stones — became his primary medium, collected or arranged on paper to bring the presence of a specific place into the gallery. He prefers his name in lower-case. In 2015 he represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale with to be all ways to be. He lives in Eschenau, Germany.

Austrian electronic music producer and DJ, co-founder of Herrensauna, a Berlin party series established in 2015 that built its reputation on hard techno and sex-positive queer culture at Tresor. Represented by Frameworks Agency, his DJ sets draw on an intense convergence of rhythmic tension and obscure sonic imagery, moving across EBM, electro, hard trance, and industrial music. He has performed at Tresor Berlin, Sonar Festival, Melt Festival, and venues across Europe. The name — Roman numerals for 1985 — signals a historical reference and a deliberate opacity in a scene that prizes anonymity and sonic confrontation over biographical disclosure.

48 Cameras is an international collective founded in 1984 by Jean-Marie Mathoul, a Belgian social worker born in Huy, after encountering the spoken word recordings of William S. Burroughs. At a literary event in Liège he met UK-based writer Paul Buck, and together they formed the group. The collective operates through correspondence and internet collaboration, drawing members from Belgium, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and beyond. Its music spans experimental, spoken word, and post-punk territory. Over more than three decades the group has released thirteen albums and performed live on only eight occasions, reflecting its distributed, non-conventional structure.

German composer and musicologist born in 1947 who shaped electroacoustic education in Germany across three decades at the Berlin University of the Arts. After studying theoretical computer science, linguistics, and systematic musicology in Berlin, he spent two years at the Instituut voor Sonologie in Utrecht under Gottfried Michael Koenig. From 1985 to 2017 he headed the UNI.K Studio for Sonic Arts and Sound Research at UdK, and from 2009 to 2015 directed its Sound Studies postgraduate programme. His book Elektroakustische Musik und Computermusik remains a standard reference surveying the history, aesthetics, and methods of computer and electroacoustic composition.

Camille Norment (b. 1970, Silver Spring, Maryland) is an American artist based in Oslo working across sound, installation, sculpture, performance, and video. She studied interactive technologies at NYU and art history at the University of Michigan, later researching haptic media at Interval Research.

With the Camille Norment Trio she performs on glass armonica, electric guitar, and Hardanger fiddle, exploring resonance and the cultural politics of sound — instruments historically linked to the body and to social control. In 2015 she represented Norway in the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale with Rapture, a sculptural sound installation built around the glass armonica's haunting tones.

The ICP (Instant Composers Pool) Orchestra is a Dutch jazz and improvisation ensemble founded in Amsterdam in 1967 by Misha Mengelberg, Han Bennink, and Willem Breuker. Following Breuker's departure, Mengelberg and Bennink led the ensemble for decades, developing a collective approach to free jazz that incorporated elements of Dada, Dutch humour, cabaret, and classical European music alongside free improvisation. The ICP's work has been released extensively on their own ICP label, and includes long-running pieces alongside completely spontaneous collective music. The ensemble remains active following Mengelberg's death in 2017, continuing in the spirit of its founders.

Voice Crack was a Swiss improvising duo of Norbert Möslang and Andy Guhl, active from 1972 to 2002. Over three decades, they developed one of the most consistent and theoretically coherent practices in European free improvisation — a method they called cracked everyday electronics, in which consumer devices (radios, game consoles, children's toys) were modified, damaged, and used in ways that radically exceeded their original functions.

Their practice transformed obsolete and unreliable technology into instruments of unpredictable sonic behavior, producing music that could not be controlled or anticipated even by the performers themselves.

Born in Mariel on 29 June 1919 and dying in Havana on 5 November 2008, he was the first Cuban composer to work with electroacoustics, spatial music, and multimedia. He composed approximately one hundred electroacoustic pieces for tape and mixed forces. In 1979 he founded the Taller de Investigación de Música Electroacústica (TIME), which became the Laboratorio Nacional de Música Electroacústica (LNME) in 1990, creating lasting institutional foundations for electroacoustic composition in Cuba and training generations of Cuban composers in experimental technique.

Born in Linköping, Sweden in 1956, this Stockholm-based composer and visual artist has worked since the late 1970s with frequencies, radio signals, and electronic interference as primary materials. His installations investigate electricity, paranormal transmission, and architectural space, drawing on his expertise in the electronic voice phenomenon research of Friedrich Jürgenson. He received a Prix Ars Electronica award in 2002 and has shown at documenta X, the Venice Biennale, and Manifesta. In 2019 he formed Dark Morph with Jónsi of Sigur Rós.

Tim Ingold (b. 1948) is a British social anthropologist whose theoretical work has been widely influential in art, design, architecture, and sound studies. His book Lines: A Brief History (2007) proposed a reconceptualisation of line as a mode of movement and wayfaring rather than a boundary between surfaces, a reframing with implications for how drawing, music, narrative, and walking are understood. His concept of wayfaring — knowing the world by moving along paths rather than surveying it from a distance — and his engagement with skill and material culture have provided frameworks for artists thinking about process, inscription, and the relation between bodies, tools, and materials.

Kptmichigan is an experimental electronic and noise project releasing in the American underground. Working in abstract electronic composition and noise, their recordings occupy a space between experimental ambient music and harsher electronic territories. Releasing on independent labels and cassette imprints, the project participates in the broader American underground electronic music network.

Wolf Vostell (1932–1998) was a German-Spanish artist and a key figure in the Fluxus movement, known for his happenings, dé-coll/age works, and early video art. He was born in Leverkusen and spent much of his later life in Spain, where he founded the Museo Vostell Malpartida, a permanent installation housing his work in Extremadura.

His concept of dé-coll/age — tearing and collaging posters and images — was developed in parallel with similar ideas emerging from Fluxus and related movements, and he was one of the first artists to incorporate television sets into happenings and installations, making him alongside Nam June Paik a pioneer of video art.

Founded in Mexico City in 1980 by Alex Eisenring, Syntoma was among the earliest and most distinctive projects in the Mexican underground electronic scene, operating primarily as a trio through 1981–84. Drawing on rock, jazz, and progressive backgrounds, Eisenring built the project around synthesizers and drum machines at a time when such equipment was scarce and expensive in Mexico, with gear frequently passed between the nascent scene's participants. The resulting recordings — collected on a self-titled album released by EM Records — combine minimal synth, post-punk, and pop forms with a harmonic adventurousness and atmosphere distinct from their European contemporaries.

Múm are an Icelandic electronic group formed in Reykjavík in 1997, initially a duo of twin brothers Gyða and Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir alongside Gunnar Örn Tynes and Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason. Their early releases on FatCat Records — particularly Yesterday Was Dramatic - Today Is OK (2000) and Finally We Are No One (2002) — established a sound of extraordinary delicacy: glitchy electronics, glockenspiel, violin, and childlike vocals layered into quietly magical compositions. Their work was influential in indie electronic and post-rock circles. The Valtýsdóttir sisters left the group; Múm has continued with changing members but consistent sensibility.

Joy Division was a post-punk band from Salford, England, formed in 1976 by Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, and Stephen Morris. Working with producer Martin Hannett at Factory Records, they developed a sound of stark, glacial intensity — cavernous drums, bass-driven melodies, and Curtis's baritone vocals addressing isolation, illness, and disintegration. Unknown Pleasures (1979) and Closer (1980) are among the most influential records in post-punk history. Curtis died by suicide on 18 May 1980, the night before their first US tour; the remaining members formed New Order. Their influence on subsequent decades of guitar-based and electronic music is incalculable.

Born in Shanghai in 1930, the son of a British business executive, he spent four years in a Japanese internment camp near the city during the Second World War — an experience he later fictionalised in Empire of the Sun (1984), which won the Guardian Fiction Prize and was adapted by Steven Spielberg in 1987. His earlier novels Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974), and High-Rise (1975) depicted modern middle-class life devolving into violence, exploring the psychopathology of technology and built environments. The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) presented a fragmented, experimental narrative of media saturation. He died in London in April 2009.

Rick Smith (b. 1959) is the producer, composer, and keyboardist of Underworld, the British electronic music group he co-founded with Karl Hyde. Smith's production is defined by attention to texture, space, and the integration of live and electronic elements that distinguishes Underworld's records from their contemporaries. His work on albums including Dubnobasswithmyheadman (1993) and Second Toughest in the Infants (1996) established a model of electronic album-making balancing formal rigour with physical impact. Beyond Underworld, Smith was musical director for the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games with Danny Boyle, whose soundtrack topped charts across Europe.

Born in 1972 in Croydon, he co-founded Blueprint Records in 1996 alongside Richard Polson, establishing one of UK techno's most uncompromising labels. His musical formation began in mid-1980s electro and hip-hop, and he was among the first British producers to absorb Detroit techno into a distinctly minimal, industrial framework. Working early on as one half of Outline with Polson, his debut album Further Design appeared on Blueprint in 1998. Following Polson's death in 2006 the label relaunched in 2009 and has continued to release work by Oliver Ho, Karl O'Connor, and Surgeon alongside his own productions.

Rie Nakajima is a Japanese sculptor living in London. She has been working on creating installations and performances by responding to the physical character of spaces using a combination of motorized devices and found objects. Fusing sculpture and sound, her artistic practice is open to chance and the influence of others. She has exhibited and performed worldwide. Her frequent collaborators include David Cunningham, Keiko Yamamoto, Pierre Berthet, Marie Roux, Billy Steiger, David Toop, and Akira Sakata.

Konrad Sprenger (born Joerg Hiller, 1977, Lahr) is a Berlin-based composer and artist working with a custom computer-controlled multi-channel electric guitar whose strings function as frequency generators. Capable of Euclidean rhythmic patterns, microtonal tuning, and continuous performance, the instrument produces sounds simultaneously evoking guitar, harpsichord, drum machine, and orchestra. His influences span Minimalism, Krautrock, and Techno; his work pursues transcendence through propulsive full-spectrum sound. He has collaborated with Arnold Dreyblatt and Ellen Fullman since 2000, runs Choose Records, and has released on Pan. He has performed at MoMA PS1, Berghain, and Sonar.

Sapto Raharjo (b. 1955, Jakarta) is an Indonesian composer and performer who has spent decades integrating traditional Javanese musical techniques with electronics and computer technology. As a child in the 1960s in Yogyakarta, he studied gamelan and Javanese dance as a member of the dance and karawitan group Arena Budhaya, developing a deep grounding in the tonal systems and performance practices of Javanese classical music.

In the 1970s, he became a rock and folk guitarist and began exploring the possibilities of joining pentatonic gamelan scales with diatonic instruments using found materials.

Born in Brisbane in 1976, he is a composer, curator, and the founder of Room40, the Brisbane-based label he established in 2000, through which he has released more than two hundred titles spanning drone, field recording, and electroacoustic music. His own compositions treat extended duration and environmental forces as primary materials, and his field recording work has taken him as far as Antarctica to capture the sounds of rare conditions. He has collaborated with artists including Grouper, Ben Frost, and Francisco López. His curatorial and compositional output has been central to establishing a sustained international context for experimental sound in Australia.

Edgard Varèse (1883–1965) was a French-born composer who emigrated to the United States in 1915 and became one of the foundational figures of 20th-century experimental music. Rejecting tonal hierarchies, he conceived of music as organised sound and explored timbre, rhythm, and texture as primary materials. Works including Ionisation (1931) — scored entirely for percussion — Density 21.5 (1936) for solo flute, and Poème électronique (1958), created for the Brussels World's Fair and diffused through 425 speakers, established him as a pioneer of electronic and spatial music. He was a formative influence on virtually every subsequent direction in experimental music.

Bernard Parmegiani (1927–2013) was a French composer and key figure at the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) in Paris, where he worked from 1959 until his retirement. A student and later colleague of Pierre Schaeffer, he produced an extraordinarily rich body of electroacoustic and musique concrète compositions. Works such as De Natura Sonorum (1975) and La Création du Monde (1984) are landmarks of the form. His music is characterized by sophisticated organization of sonic objects, a refined sense of spatial placement, and deep imaginative engagement with the life of sound.

Spiritualized is the project of Jason Pierce (J Spaceman), an English musician from Rugby, formed in 1990 after the dissolution of Spacemen 3. Where Spacemen 3 drew on blues, drone, and the Velvet Underground, Spiritualized expanded the palette to include orchestration, gospel, and free jazz — resulting in Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (1997), a record of extraordinary ambition combining dense sonic arrangements with Pierce's unflinching examination of addiction and love. Subsequent albums Let It Come Down (2001) and Sweet Heart Sweet Light (2012) maintained the scale and intensity. Pierce has remained the project's sole constant member.

Alghol is a black metal project from Maine, conceived and executed entirely by Pete Rodway — who writes, performs, records, produces, mixes, and masters all the material himself. His releases include Forgotten Paths (A Pile of Graves, 2020), a split with Panzerwar titled From the Caverns… Echos of the Undead Call (2020), and Night Eternal (2023). Rodway's approach combines the raw atmosphere of underground black metal with an emphasis on autonomous, self-sufficient production — a method consistent with the DIY values of the underground scenes through which Alghol circulates.

Born in Olympia, Washington in 1982, Catherine Lamb is an American composer and violist whose work centres on just intonation and extended harmonic space. She studied Hindustani music in Pune, India before completing a BFA at CalArts under James Tenney and Michael Pisaro, and an MFA at Bard College. Her ongoing Prisma Interius series and works including Parallaxis Forma and divisio spiralis have been performed by the JACK Quartet and Ghost Ensemble. Recordings appear on Another Timbre, New World Records, and Sacred Realism. She received the 2020 Ernst von Siemens Composer Prize.

Born in Newark, New Jersey on June 3, 1926, and died April 5, 1997, he was a poet, political activist, and central figure of the Beat generation. His long poem Howl, written in 1954–55 and published in 1956 by City Lights Books, triggered an obscenity trial in 1957 that drew national attention and ultimately affirmed the work's literary status. His poetry drew on modernism, jazz rhythms, and his Kagyu Buddhist practice. He helped found the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, establishing it as a lasting centre for alternative poetics and contemplative pedagogy.

Alvin Curran is an American composer and performer born in 1938 in Providence, Rhode Island. A founding member of Musica Elettronica Viva in Rome in 1966 alongside Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum, he has since developed a practice spanning electronic improvisation, orchestral composition, installation, and outdoor performance. His work often incorporates field recordings, shortwave radio, and unconventional instrumental combinations. He taught at Mills College in Oakland for many years and has received numerous commissions and awards across both sides of the Atlantic. He continues to compose and perform extensively.

Sound artist and filmmaker born in East Berlin in 1978 whose audio work focuses on the deconstruction of language and the mechanisms of communication through concrete music, field recordings, and electroacoustic composition. Since 2001 he has run the label 90% Wasser with Robert Schalinski, and together with Schalinski and René Lamp he was a core member of the influential Berlin artist collective Column One until the group disbanded in 2016. He has produced works for radio and released numerous records, and lives and works in the Havelland region north of Berlin.

Born in Los Angeles on 23 October 1969, he received his MFA from CalArts and his PhD from the London Consortium, with post-doctoral research at the University of Copenhagen. His artistic and theoretical work explores sound in relation to space, community, politics, and everyday life, and he is the founding editor of Errant Bodies Press in Berlin. He is best known for the books Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art and Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life, both central texts in sound studies. More recent publications include Sonic Agency (2018) and Acoustic Justice (2021).

Djibril Diabaté is a musician and artist working across West African musical traditions and contemporary experimental music. His practice connects griot traditions and the acoustic and performance heritage of Guinea and Mali with contemporary electroacoustic and interdisciplinary contexts. Working with kora, traditional instruments, and electronics, he develops work that investigates how West African musical forms can be extended and transformed without losing their essential relationship to specific cultural and social practices. He has performed internationally in contexts ranging from ethnomusicological presentations to experimental music festivals.

Jennifer Walshe (b. 1974, Dublin) is an Irish composer whose work operates in the spaces between composition, performance, visual art, and media culture. She studied composition with John Maxwell Geddes at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Kevin Volans in Dublin, and completed a doctoral degree in composition at Northwestern University, Chicago in 2002. She is currently professor of composition at the University of Oxford.

Her compositions frequently incorporate video, found text, collaborative performance, and engagement with contemporary media aesthetics.

Sanctum is a Swedish ritual ambient and industrial music project, one of the more significant Scandinavian acts in the neo-folk and dark ambient tradition. Releasing on Cold Meat Industry in the 1990s, they worked in extended, meditative sound environments drawing on European esoteric traditions and the aesthetics of the Scandinavian industrial underground. Their albums combine electronics, acoustic instruments, and voice in compositions of considerable patience and ritual gravity, contributing to the international dark ambient canon alongside Raison d'être and Nordvargr.

Hironori Nagatsuma is a Japanese sound artist and musician whose practice engages with electronic sound, field recording, and minimal composition. Working in Tokyo's experimental music underground, his releases on independent labels develop slowly evolving sonic environments that balance electronic abstraction with an attentive relationship to acoustic and environmental sound. His work participates in the continuing tradition of Japanese post-Fluxus experimental music while engaging with contemporary electroacoustic and composition practices.

Z'ev (Stefan Joel Silverman, 1951–2017) was an American percussionist and sound poet who performed solo on industrial metal objects — including oil drums, sheet metal, steel girders, and industrial detritus — creating dense rhythmic and tonal works of great power and originality. He was one of the earliest practitioners of industrial percussion and was active in the experimental underground from the late 1970s until his death.

Working without amplification in his earliest period, Z'ev developed a practice of physically exhausting performance in which the percussionist's body and the metal objects were both transformed by the encounter.

Italian DJ and producer who began his career in Rome in 1987 and became a key figure of the early Italian techno and rave scene. In 1991, alongside the twin duo D'Arcangelo, he co-founded Automatic Sound Unlimited, one of Italy's first experimental techno groups, blending electro and industrial tones in ways that anticipated what is now called industrial techno. Sonic Groove label founder Adam X has cited him as a true innovator of the genre. His 2018 ambient-techno LP The Experiment was released on Kynant Records. Since 2015 he has been part of the Sonic Groove roster and has collaborated with Anthony Rother, Keith Tucker, and Aux 88.

Founded by Richard Ramirez in Houston, Texas in 1989, this harsh noise project is one of the earliest American acts in the genre and has remained one of its most prolific. Ramirez builds tracks from dense, slowly shifting or static masses of heavily distorted low- to mid-range noise, gravitating in recent years toward drone-influenced structures. The project draws thematically on gay leather subculture and confrontational performance. Ramirez is also active under the names Werewolf Jerusalem and other aliases, releasing material across dozens of labels.

NMO is the project between drummer Morten J. Olsen and synthesis aficionado Rubén Patiño. N.M.O. is an acronym that serves to frame the work of a rolling computerized ceremonial aerobics unit operating in a hybrid territory between club music, performance, and inventive forms of sound spatialisation.

To follow three EP releases, N.M.O. have also released a proto-techno-tinged concept 12″ on Where To Now? and a double 12″ for Powell’s Diagonal Records. Their LP Nordic Mediterranean Organization/Numerous Miscommunications Occur came out on Diagonal in October 2016, followed by the Vinyl Factory EP release, Nassau Molasses Office/ Deutsch Am Fuß in 2017.

Volker Straebel, born in 1969 and raised in West Berlin, is a German composer, musicologist, and curator specialising in electroacoustic music and the history of sound art. He studied musicology, philosophy, and library science at the Technische Universität and Humboldt-Universität in Berlin before writing music criticism for Der Tagesspiegel and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from 1996 to 2002. He served as curatorial advisor to MaerzMusik from 2002 to 2014, and in 2021 became dean of the Herb Alpert School of Music at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles.

Tobias Fischer is a Berlin-based German author, journalist, radio host, and editor. As editor-in-chief of Tokafi and publisher of 15 Questions, he has developed a significant body of writing on sound art, experimental music, and contemporary composition. A cultural editor for the German recording magazine Beat, his books include Animal Music (co-authored with Lara Cory, Strange Attractor Press, 2015) and Se Dio Vuole / God Willing (with Alessandra Eramo, Corvo, 2015). He has presented work at Café OTO in London and other experimental music contexts.

Adam Campbell is a Scottish musician and software developer based between Glasgow and Manchester. His practice centres on improvisation, feedback, and nonlinear systems, operating under the project name fancyyyyy — simultaneously a record label, a Eurorack synthesizer module producer, and an artist platform for experimental electronic music releases alongside custom-built hardware. Collaborative projects include Ego Depletion with Fritz Welch and Butter with Tina Krekels and Grant Smith.

Satori is a UK-based industrial and power electronics project founded in the early 1980s by Dave Kirby and Rob Maycock. Self-described as Fortean Electronics and Death Sonics, the project mixes harsh noise, tape manipulation, distorted vocals, and heavy percussion across releases on Broken Flag, Cold Spring, and Tesco Organisation. Key albums include Behold the Past (1988), Infect (1995), Contemptus Mundi (2008), and The Woods (2023). The group toured Japan with Sutcliffe Jugend in 2007 and has remained active into the 2020s.

Vienna-based musician, programmer, and sound artist, he is among the first performers to have brought the laptop onto the concert stage, doing so in the Austrian capital around 1993. His practice centres on sine waves—their emergence at the threshold of perception and their interaction with acoustic instruments. He holds a teaching position at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and created ppooll, a freeware modular software environment for real-time processing that continues to be used by improvising musicians around the world. He has collaborated with performers across Europe and releases on Mikroton and Potlatch.

Neu! were a German duo — Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger — formed in Düsseldorf in 1971 after both left the early Kraftwerk. Three albums on Brain Records — Neu! (1972), Neu! 2 (1973), and Neu! 75 (1975) — produced some of the most influential music of the rock era. Dinger's motorik drumbeat, a relentless 4/4 pattern, provided the rhythmic foundation for proto-punk, new wave, post-rock, and krautrock; Rother's guitar created shimmering textural landscapes above it. The collaboration ended in 1975. Their influence across punk, electronic music, and beyond is incalculable.

Born in Jonesboro, Georgia in 1896, he settled in Oakland, California in 1929 after years of itinerant work, including time with the Southern Pacific Railroad as a fireman and gandy dancer. Around 1950 he began performing as a one-man band, playing guitar, harmonica, kazoo, and the fotdella, a six-stringed bass instrument of his own construction, played with the foot via piano-style pedals, its name coined by his wife from the phrase foot-diller. In 1954 he wrote San Francisco Bay Blues, which became his most celebrated song and was widely covered following the British folk revival. He died in Oakland in January 1976.

Founded in Genoa, Italy, in January 1991 by guitarist and keyboardist Tommy Talamanca and drummer Marco Pesenti, who had departed Necrodeath to pursue a more progressive direction. Their 1991 debut Black Screams established the technical ambition that would define their catalogue. Talamanca has remained the constant compositional force through the band's full run, including a hiatus after 2000's Lego and a reunion in 2005. Singer Trevor Nadir has fronted the group since 1996, and later lineups absorbed members who had played with Obscura and Necrophagist.

Evgeny (Eugene) Alexandrovitch Sholpo (1891–1951) was a Soviet inventor, musician, and pioneer of early electronic and optical sound technology. Born in the Pskov region of Russia, he became a leading figure in experimental sound research during the 1920s–1940s.
Sholpo is best known for inventing the Variophone, an early optical sound synthesizer that generated music by photographing drawn waveforms onto film and converting them into sound via photoelectric cells. Developed around 1930 in Leningrad, the Variophone could produce complex, polyphonic electronic music and was used in film soundtracks and experimental compositions.

Maryanne Amacher (1938–2009) was an American composer of large-scale fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of perception, sound spatialization, creative intelligence, and aural architecture. She is frequently cited as a pioneer of what has come to be called sound art, although her thought and creative practice consistently challenged the assumptions and limitations of this nascent genre, which she often found too modest for the scope of what she was pursuing.

Graham Lambkin is a British musician and sound artist based in the United States. A founding member and leader of The Shadow Ring — the Kent-based group whose cassette-based no-wave and improvised work occupied an eccentric position in 1990s underground music — he has since developed a solo practice of field recording, domestic sound art, and abstract collage. Releases including Salmon Run (2007), Amateur Doubles (2012), and Air Supply (2014) on Kye and other labels establish a highly personal world of uncanny everyday sound. He has collaborated with Jason Lescalleet, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, and others, and remains an influential figure in the international underground.

A Danish composer, sound artist, and live performer whose path into electronic music passed through stints as an actress and stuntwoman before settling into sound installation and theatre work. Berlin's Atonal Festival and Tresor have featured her alongside Boiler Room appearances, and her first live show at Contort in Berlin opened wider touring. Her studio output spans ambient, IDM, industrial, and techno, distinguished by insistent rhythms and meticulous timbral exploration. She also composes for video games and film, extending her practice well beyond the club context.

Born in Palermo and now based in London, he works with speakers, samplers, CD players, walkmans, and tape recorders to address the performativity of the musical act and the perception of sound diffusion. From 2004 to 2007 he collaborated with Xing in Bologna, co-curating with Valerio Tricoli the Desco Music series of electronic and electroacoustic concerts at Raum. With Louie Rice he runs NO-PA/PA-ON, a project for score-based acoustic and amplified works, and his recordings appear on labels including Boring Machines, Consumer Waste, Kohlhaas, and TakuRoku.

Teresa Margolles (b. 1963, Culiacán, Sinaloa) is a Mexican artist whose work directly engages with the material reality of violent death, using bodily fluids, water from morgue washdowns, and objects retrieved from crime scenes to create works that refuse the aestheticization of violence and force a confrontation with the human cost of social crisis in Mexico and beyond.

A former member of the collective SEMEFO (Servicio Médico Forense), which worked with cadavers and forensic materials in the early 1990s, Margolles has continued this trajectory as a solo artist. She has represented Mexico at the Venice Biennale and has exhibited at major institutions worldwide.

Vivenza is the project of French industrial and noise musician Jean-Marc Vivenza, who has been active since the early 1980s producing recordings that draw directly on the sounds of industrial machinery — furnaces, factories, steam engines, metalworking — as primary compositional material. His approach connects to the Italian Futurist celebration of machine noise, and he has written extensively on this theoretical inheritance.

Vivenza is also a significant theorist of industrial music, contributing essays and analyses that situate his and others' industrial practice within both aesthetic and political frameworks.

Porest is the alias of Mark Gergis, an American musician, label operator, and field recordist based in San Francisco. Working in musique concrète, noise, and documentary sound, he releases on Siltbreeze, Pogus, and his own Majmua label. His recordings combine found sounds, ethnographic field recordings, and electronic manipulation into fractured compositions of considerable formal wit. He has also travelled extensively documenting music from Syria, India, and Southeast Asia, releasing these recordings in collaboration with Sublime Frequencies. His practice bridges sound art, documentary ethnomusicology, and noise in an uncommon way.

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) was an American photographer and gallerist who played a central role in establishing photography as a fine art and in introducing European modernism to the United States. Through his journal Camera Work and galleries including 291, he championed Pictorialist and later straight photography while exhibiting Picasso, Matisse, and Brancusi.

His own photographic series, including Equivalents — cloud studies intended as pure abstractions of emotion — argued that a photograph could function as an artwork independent of its subject. He was married to painter Georgia O'Keeffe, whom he extensively photographed and promoted.

Burzum is a Norwegian music project founded by Varg Vikernes in 1991, widely regarded as a pioneering act in the development of atmospheric black metal. The project's early albums — Burzum (1992), Aske (1993), Det Som Engang Var (1993), and Hvis Lyset Tar Oss (1994) — helped establish a distinctively raw, atmospheric approach to black metal that influenced the subsequent development of the genre internationally.

Vikernes's association with the church-burning wave that swept Norway in the early 1990s and his conviction for the murder of fellow musician Euronymous of Mayhem in 1993 have made Burzum one of the most controversial projects in extreme music.

Born in 1979, this Canadian artist works across sound and analogue film in installation, performance, and theatrical exhibition. His film El Mar La Mar, co-directed with J.P. Sniadecki, won the Caligari Film Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 2017 and entered the permanent collection of MoMA. His 2020 documentary The Two Sights, made in the Scottish Hebrides, won the Best Sound Award at Cinéma du Réel in Paris and premiered at the Berlinale. His four-disc audio work The Pines documents a full year of field recordings from a single pine tree in upstate New York, distilled into seasonal portraits.

Born from a shared obsession with high-velocity sound, this Bali-based duo of DJ Kasimyn and MC Ican Harem collides gabber, footwork, and grindcore with Indonesian forms including jathilan trance dance, dangdut koplo, and funkot. Their debut album Puxxximaxxx (2018) on Yes No Wave Music was followed by Hoxxxya (2019), both quickly becoming international dancefloor references. In 2022, Kasimyn collaborated with Björk on her album Fossora after she discovered their music during pandemic lockdown. The project remains one of the most distinctive voices bridging Southeast Asian club culture with global experimental electronic music.

Jim O'Rourke (born 1969) is an American musician, producer, and sound artist based in Japan. One of the most versatile and influential figures in American experimental music since the 1990s, he has worked as a guitarist, producer, composer, and performer across free improvisation, noise, rock, and electronic music. His records Bad Timing (1997) and Eureka (1999) on Drag City are landmark works of avant-folk; he has also produced Wilco and Sonic Youth records, collaborated with Merzbow, Derek Bailey, and Günter Müller, and composed electroacoustic works on Tzadik. He left the US for Tokyo in the mid-2000s and has continued there in an extensive and varied practice.

Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson is an Icelandic sound artist born in 1974, based in Reykjavík. He is a founding member of Stilluppsteypa, the influential Icelandic electronic trio he formed in the early 1990s with Helgi Thorsson and Heimir Björgúlfsson, which has become one of the most consistently inventive and internationally recognised groups in the Icelandic experimental scene.

Stilluppsteypa's recordings — released on Ritornell, Nature Bliss, Sónar, Ash International and other labels — blend noise, found sound, field recordings, electronics and humour into work that refuses easy categorisation, moving between abstract electronics and something approaching lo-fi composition.

Marianne Teixidó is a live coder, media artist, musician, and transhackfeminist based in Mexico City. Working with TidalCycles and related tools, she creates audiovisual performances that operate at the intersection of code, sound, and feminist technology politics. She has been among the most committed figures in spreading live coding practice in Mexico — when she began, there were almost no workshops and the few practitioners were reluctant to teach; it was through contact with Colombian live coder Alexandra Cárdenas that she first began making sound with code.

Toxe (born Tove Agélii, 1997, Gothenburg) is a Swedish electronic musician and DJ based in New York. A core member of the Stockholm collective Staycore, she began releasing music to SoundCloud at seventeen and trained as an architect, writing her thesis on the publicity of domestic space. Her records — including Blinks (PAN, 2018) and the debut album Toxe2 (Year0001, 2024) — combine heavy drums and sharp synthesisers in a style connecting club experimentalism to pop structure. She has collaborated with Mechatok as the duo Emiranda and released on Halcyon Veil and Year0001.

Born in Córdoba, Argentina in 1943, Vaggione co-founded the Experimental Music Center at the National University of Córdoba in 1965 before leaving for Europe in 1969. He worked at electroacoustic studios in Madrid, then in Paris at GRM, IRCAM, and IMEB, receiving a doctorate from the University of Paris VIII in 1983. From 1989 he taught at Paris VIII, directing the Centre de recherche informatique et création musicale (CICM) and becoming Professor Emeritus in 2012. His compositions for performers and computers explore micromontage, granular synthesis, and microsound. Awards include the Euphonie d'Or at Bourges and the International Computer Music Association award, both 1992.

Amazon Bambi is an experimental electronic musician and performer known for playful yet abrasive noise and club-oriented sound explorations. Her sets and releases mix humor, intensity and unconventional structures, challenging expectations within underground electronic and noise scenes. Her work inhabits the territory between performance art and club music, deploying excess and absurdity as critical tools against normalizing conventions of listening and spectatorship. She remains a distinct and irreverent voice within the broader experimental electronic community.

Curator, sound artist, and researcher based in La Paz, Bolivia, she founded and has directed SONANDES since 2014, a platform for artistic experimentation that runs an international sound art biennial, residencies, laboratories, and publications. Her research explores alternative methodologies for collective artistic creation at the intersection of politics, technology, and gender. Since 2020 she has led Wak'a: Neo-Extractivism, Sacredness and Deep Listening, a collaborative project linking Bolivian artists with international practitioners. In 2023 she received the Cultural and Artistic Responses to Environmental Change Award from the Prince Claus Foundation and the Goethe-Institut.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (b. 1952) is an American anthropologist known for her work on globalization, ecology, and the relationships between human and nonhuman life. She is the author of The Mushroom at the End of the World, which uses the global trade in matsutake mushrooms to explore how life persists and even flourishes amid capitalist ruin and environmental disturbance.

Her concept of "contamination" as a generative force, alongside her contributions to multispecies ethnography, has been influential across anthropology, environmental humanities, and contemporary art, offering frameworks for thinking about precarity, collaboration, and survival in damaged landscapes.

Christian Fennesz (b. 25 December 1962, Vienna) is an Austrian guitarist and electronic musician whose work processes guitar through laptop computers to produce layered, melodic textures at the boundary of glitch and ambient music. His debut full-length Hotel Paral.lel appeared on Editions Mego in 1997, and his 2001 album Endless Summer brought him wide recognition for its luminous blending of Beach Boys melody with treated electronics. The 2004 follow-up Venice extended his approach into more atmospheric territory. He has collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto, David Sylvian, and others, and remains one of the most influential figures in post-digital guitar music.

Brooklyn-based guitarist born in Germany, Tammen has developed a performance practice he calls Endangered Guitar, in which the instrument is prepared in ways analogous to John Cage's prepared piano and then subjected to real-time processing via a custom Max/MSP software environment. He began performing solo improvisation regularly in 1994 and received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in Digital/Electronic Arts in 2009 for the Endangered Guitar project. His debut solo album of the same name appeared in 1998. His music has been described as rapid-fire juxtapositions of radically contrastive textures, and he has worked with many figures in the New York improvised music scene.

Born in Greenville, South Carolina on 4 April 1925, Emmett Williams studied poetry with John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College and anthropology at the University of Paris before spending most of the 1950s and 1960s in Europe. He participated in the Darmstadt concrete poetry circle from 1957 to 1959 and became European coordinator of Fluxus in the 1960s, working closely with Robert Filliou and George Maciunas. He edited the foundational An Anthology of Concrete Poetry for Something Else Press, and in 1991 published the autobiography My Life in Fluxus — And Vice Versa. He died in Berlin on 14 February 2007.

Jane Pain is the alias of Jane Chardiet, a New York-based noise musician, 35mm photographer, and writer. A second-generation punk — both of her parents were punk — she found her way into noise through Pissed Jeans, attending a noise show that felt like a revelation. Her path from punk bands through increasingly strange keyboards and electronics to solo noise performance was gradual and deliberate: learning gear in collaborative contexts before performing alone as Jane Pain. She plays vocals and electronics in the tech-noise duo Appetite (with Ciarra Black), and vocals in the LA-based project Safe Word. Her solo noise project performs under the alias NYDN.

Yan Jun is a Beijing-based sound artist, poet, and curator whose work has played a pivotal role in the development of experimental music in China. Active as a music critic and underground rock musician in the 1990s, he later turned toward improvisation, field recording, feedback systems, and site-specific sound practices. His performances employ minimal means—microphones, loudspeakers, environmental sounds—to heighten awareness of listening. Through concerts, recordings, writings, and curatorial work, he has fostered dialogue between local and international experimental communities, positioning listening as both an aesthetic and social act.

Zbigniew Karkowski (1958–2013) was a Polish composer and noise musician who spent much of his career based in Japan and became one of the most significant figures in harsh noise and experimental electronic music. He studied at IRCAM in Paris and at the Gothenburg Academy of Music, bringing academic rigor to noise practices that typically resist institutional legitimation.

Karkowski's music is characterized by its brutal sonic density and its mathematical underpinning — complex algorithmic processes generating apparently chaotic sound textures.

Chris Cutler (b. 1947) is a British drummer, composer, theorist, and label founder whose work with Henry Cow — the experimental rock group he co-founded with Fred Frith in 1968 — and subsequent projects have made him one of the most significant and seriously engaged figures in experimental and improvised music. Henry Cow combined influences from Bartók, Stockhausen, and free jazz with rock instrumentation to produce music of unusual formal ambition.

After Henry Cow disbanded in 1978, Cutler continued in Art Bears with Frith and Dagmar Krause, and in Recommended Records (ReR), the label and distribution network he founded in 1978 to support experimental music outside the mainstream industry.

Born in Austria in 1968 and based in Switzerland, Rudolf Eb.er founded the outsider art group Schimpfluch in 1987 before establishing Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck in 1989, a project he maintained until 2009. Working within extreme noise, sound collage, and musique concrète, the practice is rooted in the actionist tradition and organised around what Eb.er calls necroglotta: occult psychomagick incantations embedded in dense psychoactive sonic environments. The work combines Dadaist endurance strategies with transgressive body-based performance and ritualistic sound, occupying a deliberately confrontational position at the margins of European experimental practice.

Terry Fox (1943–2008) was an American performance and sound artist based for much of his career in San Francisco and later in Europe. Beginning in the late 1960s, his performance work was among the most rigorous and influential coming out of the Bay Area, characterized by extreme physical endurance, duration, and a spare, contemplative relationship to the body in space. He worked alongside David Ireland and Paul Kos in the San Francisco Bay Area conceptual art scene.

Fox later developed a sustained sound practice focused on vibrating rods, resonating materials, and the subtle sonic phenomena that occur in specific physical and spatial relationships.

Ziúr is a Berlin-based musician and DJ. Working at the intersection of club music and experimental electronics, her productions on Pan Records — including U Feel Anything? (2018) and Antifate (2020) — pursue extreme rhythmic abstraction, glitch, and textural complexity that moves far beyond functional club music while retaining its physical energy. She performs and DJs internationally and is associated with the Pan Records community and the experimental club scenes of Berlin, London, and New York. Her practice maintains a queer and anti-hierarchical ethos, and she is regularly involved in community-oriented music initiatives.

El Jardín de las Matemáticas is a cross-continental improvisational ensemble comprising Alvaro Daguer and Tomás Salvatierra (Santiago, Chile), Pablo Picco (Salsipuedes, Argentina), and Mark Harwood (Berlin). Recorded between January and July 2023 across Chile and Argentina, their self-titled debut LP was mastered by Rashad Becker and released on Penultimate Press (London, 2024) in a limited 300-copy pressing. Working with Chinese drum, ocarina, flutes, violin, clarinet, Korg MS-20, harmonium, gongs, and tapes, their music blends folk, ethnomusicology, musique concrète, and psychedelia — described by the label as "acoustic DMT," with references to Angus Maclise and Pygmy Unit.

Hatebeak is an American death metal band formed by Blake Harrison and Mark Sloan, distinguished by one of the most singular voices in extreme music: Waldo, a grey parrot (b. 1991). Waldo's piercing squawks cut through distorted guitars and blast beats like serrated air — neither parody nor novelty, but a feral counterpoint to the genre's obsession with extremity. His presence transforms the band into something both confrontational and strangely tender, reminding listeners that metal's violence is often theatrical, while the voice remains stubbornly alive and untrained.

Shirley Collins (born 1935) is an English folk singer from Hastings who was central to the British folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. She travelled to the American South with Alan Lomax in 1959, recording traditional singers for the Library of Congress; subsequent records with her sister Dolly Collins — Anthems in Eden (1969) and Love, Death and the Lady (1970) — integrated early music instruments including portative organ and crumhorn into traditional English ballad settings with results of extraordinary strangeness and beauty. A period of silence following a personal trauma ended when she returned with Lodestar in 2016, re-establishing her as a foundational figure of English folk music.

A French artist and musician active in experimental sound and media art, he is the co-founder of Artkillart, a label established in 2007 operating across Paris, Brussels, and Berlin. The label explores the technical limitations of physical media formats—vinyl, tape, CD, DVD—as a response to the dematerialisation of music, inviting artists to engage these formats to produce complex, conceptual objects. His own practice is situated within experimental electronic music and processual art. He has presented work through the Artkillart platform and in contexts associated with European experimental and sound art scenes.

An Amsterdam-based musician and cultural producer, he is associated with the Fiber Festival, a platform for art and technology in the Netherlands. He studied at Schrofer Academie and holds a Master's degree in Interdisciplinary Spatial Design, completed with distinction. His practice spans experimental and improvised music alongside curatorial and organisational activities within the Dutch experimental arts scene. Specific discographic details and a broader performance history remain sparsely documented in publicly available sources, making verification of further biographical specifics difficult.

Harun Farocki (1944–2014) was a German filmmaker and video artist who produced one of the most sustained investigations of images and their political economy in twentieth-century cinema. From his student film about napalm production, Inextinguishable Fire (1969) — in which he burned his own arm to illustrate the logic of industrial violence — to his late video installations about drone warfare and algorithmic surveillance, his work examined how images are made, deployed, and consumed in the service of power. Encompassing over a hundred films and installations, his practice moves between documentary, found footage, and direct address in a formal mode simultaneously analytical and poetic.

La Monte Young (b. 1935) is an American composer and musician widely recognised as a founder of minimalism, drone music, and concept art. Working in New York from the early 1960s, he developed a practice centred on sustained tones, just intonation, and duration as compositional material itself. His series The Well-Tuned Piano, begun in 1964, is among the most sustained compositional projects in twentieth-century music. His Theatre of Eternal Music, also known as the Dream Syndicate, including John Cale and Tony Conrad, was foundational for minimal and drone rock. A devoted student of North Indian singing under Pandit Pran Nath, Young absorbed the raga principles underpinning his work.

Phurpa is a Russian ritual music ensemble founded in 2003 in Moscow by Alexei Tegin, an artist and musician who has spent decades studying Tibetan Bön-po liturgy and its associated sonic practices. The group performs Tibetan Bön-po liturgical chants, using overtone singing, large horns (dungchen and gyaling), bells, cymbals and ritual drums in performances that reproduce the specific timbral, rhythmic and spatial dimensions of the ritual tradition.

While Tegin and his collaborators are not Bön monks, the ensemble has worked extensively with Bön teachers and has developed a practice of disciplined fidelity to the material's ritual forms and sonic specifications.

Ben Vida is an American artist and composer whose electronic and computer music explores the space between composition, performance, and installation. He has released work on Pan Records and other specialist labels. Former co-leader of the group Town and Country, he has developed an increasingly minimal and rigorous solo practice that investigates the perceptual effects of long-duration sound and the relationship between electro-acoustic material and physical space. He also works extensively as a collaborator and improvisor in New York's experimental music community.

Tetsuo Kogawa (b. 1941) is a Japanese media theorist, writer, and performance artist whose work since the late 1970s has centered on radio art and pirate microbroadcasting. He studied philosophy at Sophia and Waseda Universities and taught communication studies at Tokyo Keizai University until 2012.

Inspired by Italy's Autonomia pirate radio movement, Kogawa became the leading figure of Japan's 1980s mini-FM boom, founding Radio Home Run and the campus station Radio Polybucket as models of decentralized, anarchist media practice. He ran workshops worldwide teaching people to build low-power FM transmitters, and in the early 1980s corresponded with Félix Guattari during his visits to Japan.

Born in Portland, Oregon in 1969, his recording practice began in 1989 and spans electro-acoustic composition, harsh noise, dark ambient, field recordings, and percussion. Stacking orchestral textures, feedback, pipe organs, brass horns, and granular synthesis into monolithic structures, he has released dozens of albums over three decades. Notable records include Fields of Skin (1997), Deluge (2003), and Vilké (2013). Since 2008 he has also created abstract video art using stop-motion photo animation. In 2013 he formed the rhythmic noise band BEAST, exploring polyrhythmic animalism with rotating guest musicians.

Born in Brooklyn on January 30, 1934, to Puerto Rican parents, he became a founding figure of the Destructivist movement through a series of piano destruction concerts in which axes, ritual salt circles, and sustained cathartic force were brought to grand pianos in museums and galleries worldwide — over eighty such performances in total. In 1966 he participated in the first Destruction in Art Symposium in London, and the following year performed Piano Destruction Concert at the Whitney Museum. He also founded El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem in 1969, one of the foremost Latin American cultural institutions in the United States.

Torokoiwe: Solo Shama documents a musical tradition from the West African Sahel region — likely associated with the Fula (Fulani) or related pastoral peoples of Guinea, Mali, or Senegal. The shama is a one-string fiddle played by griots and traditional musicians across the Sahel belt. Solo performance on such instruments typically accompanies praise singing, storytelling, and ceremonial music. This recording represents an ethnographic document of a single musician's practice in a tradition of considerable antiquity and ongoing cultural significance to Sahel communities.

JASSS is the project of Silvia Jiménez Álvarez (b. 1984), a Spanish artist and musician from Asturias, based in Berlin since 2011, whose work operates at the intersection of electronic music, noise, and club culture. Her practice draws on references from industrial music and power electronics to EBM and techno, producing a sound that is simultaneously formal and physically immediate. She has released on labels including Mannequin and Where To Now?, building a body of work consistent in its engagement with tension, density, and the corporeal dimensions of sound. As a resident DJ at Herrensauna and a touring performer, she brings the same rigour to extended, genre-crossing sets.

A Paris-based sound artist and educator, Montgermont has used electromagnetic and acoustic waves as primary materials since 2004, exploring their physical and poetic dimensions through installation, performance, and antenna sculpture. Since 2008 he has taught sound and multimedia creation at ENS Louis-Lumière. In 2007 he co-founded the duo Art of Failure with Nicolas Maigret; their Resonant Architectures project used infrasound to reveal the hidden musicality of buildings, touring France, Switzerland, Germany, Slovakia, and Canada between 2009 and 2013.

goat is a Japanese free improvisation quartet comprising Ryoko Iki (alto saxophone), Futoshi Okano (drums), Yasuhiro Usui (electric bass), and Masahiko Oki (electric guitar). Working from a base of free jazz and noise rock, they develop extended improvisations that move through dense textural fields and sudden structural shifts. Their self-titled debut and subsequent releases document a group working with speed, silence, and group dynamics in an approach that sits within the Japanese free improvisation lineage while engaging fully with electric and amplified sound. They perform regularly in Japan and at international festivals.

Ghost Dubs is the project of Stuttgart-based producer Michael Fiedler, active in dub and reggae sound system culture since 1999, previously known as Jah Schulz and Tokyo Tower. The Ghost Dubs alias debuted with Damaged (2024) on Pressure, the imprint run by Kevin Martin (The Bug). The music combines low-end dub pressure, live dub technique, industrial aesthetics, dub techno, hardcore, and drone, working at the intersection of bass music traditions and experimental sound. Fiedler is also a member of avant-garde pop duo Annagemina and has scored films for independent theatre.

Growing up playing jazz saxophone in rural Mississippi, he was drawn into rave culture in the 1990s and began performing with wind controllers, collaborating with Marshall Jefferson and Soul II Soul. He subsequently developed the beatjazz system—a wearable set of handheld controllers, a mouthpiece, and a mobile processing unit that translates gesture and breath into live electronic sound. He has continued refining the system over more than a decade, framing it through Afrofuturist theory and the patternist philosophy drawn from Octavia Butler's science fiction. He has presented the beatjazz project at TED and performed extensively across Europe, the United States, and beyond.

Olia Lialina (b. 1971) is a Russian net artist, theorist, and archivist whose practice has been central to net art as a field since the mid-1990s. Her work My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996) remains one of the most cited works of early net art — a nonlinear narrative told through browser frames and hyperlinks demonstrating how web environments could function as expressive material. Her later practice engages amateur web aesthetics, digital folklore, and preserving early internet culture, including the One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age archive of rescued GeoCities pages. Her essay "A Vernacular Web" (2005) remains foundational, and since 1999 she has taught at Merz Akademie Stuttgart.

Django Reinhardt (Jean Reinhardt, 1910–1953) was a Belgian-born Romani jazz guitarist widely regarded as the first major jazz improviser to emerge from Europe. A caravan fire in 1928 severely damaged his left hand, leaving him with only two fully functional fingers on his fretting hand; he developed an entirely new technique foundational to jazz guitar. With violinist Stéphane Grappelli, he co-founded the Quintette du Hot Club de France in 1934, creating a distinctive acoustic jazz style rooted in the European string tradition. His improvisational fluency established a vocabulary that continues to define gypsy jazz and extends into virtually every style of jazz guitar.

Olek Nivette is a Belgian artist and musician working across performance, sound, and visual art. Based in Belgium, his practice draws on the intersection of body-based performance and experimental sound, with an interest in ritual, endurance, and the physical presence of the performer. He has exhibited and performed in European experimental art contexts, contributing to a tradition of performance art that treats the body and its limits as primary artistic material alongside sound and image.

Jean Jacques Perrey (1929–2016) was a French musician and electronic music pioneer whose recordings helped define the sound of early synthesiser and Moog-based music. Trained as a classical accordionist, he encountered the Ondioline — an early electronic keyboard — in the late 1940s and developed an approach to electronic performance both technically innovative and irrepressibly playful. His collaborations with Gershon Kingsley, The In Sound from Way Out! (1966) and Kaleidoscopic Vibrations (1967), established a template for melodically inventive Moog music later sampled across hip-hop and pop. His solo album Moog Indigo (1970) became a cult favourite. He died in Switzerland in 2016.

Tony Conrad (1940–2016) was an American avant-garde musician, filmmaker, and artist whose work in the early 1960s helped establish drone music as a serious practice. He was a founding member of the Theatre of Eternal Music alongside La Monte Young, John Cale, Angus MacLise, and Marian Zazeela, where he played violin in extended, just-intonation drone performances. His contribution to that group, and his subsequent relationship with Young, became a source of lasting dispute over credits and recordings.

As a filmmaker, Conrad was equally significant.

Raviv Ganchrow is an artist and sound researcher based in Amsterdam. His work investigates the interdependencies between sound, place, and listening, aspects of which are explored through installations, writing, and the development of pressure-forming and vibration-sensing technologies. His work examines spatial-material operations of sound, in situated conditions such as environmental infrasound, ocean acoustics, telluric currents, radio transmission, and anechoic chambers. Recent installations employ in-situ circuits patched directly into localities, relaying features of contextual dynamics. He is currently a faculty member at the Institute of Sonology, University of the Arts, The Hague.

Marcus Schmickler is a German electronic composer based in Cologne whose work engages with algorithmic composition, spectral analysis, and the intersection of electronic music with contemporary philosophy and mathematics. He studied at the Cologne Musikhochschule and has developed a practice that takes seriously both the formal dimensions of electronic sound and its relationship to the club music tradition from which much of his work emerges.

His releases on Dekorder, Erstwhile, and other labels document an approach to electronic composition that refuses the separation between intellectual rigor and physical impact.

Daniela Gentile is an Italian multimedia and sound artist based in Budapest. She holds a Master's in Multimedia Arts and Design from RUFA in Rome. As part of the collective Quadro Quantico, founded in 2017, she creates interactive multimedia installations. Since 2020 she has collaborated with audiovisual duo BARANSU, with a shared focus on Sound Activism — the use of sound as a political and psychophysical tool. She is a research assistant at The Works Research Institute in Budapest, studying spatialized sound and its effects on well-being.

Executive Director of Wave Farm, the international transmission arts organisation based in upstate New York, she has shaped the field since the mid-1990s. From 1996 to 2015 she worked with Electronic Arts Intermix as Assistant Director and Executive Consultant. Her book Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves (PAJ Publications, 2011) is a key reference for the field. She has produced radio works for Kunstradio Vienna and curated Sound Arts exhibitions at Columbia University, and runs WGXC 90.7-FM, a community radio station broadcasting from the Hudson Valley.

Nils Frahm is a German musician, composer, and producer born in 1982, raised near Hamburg and based in Berlin. Known for blending classical piano technique with electronics — Roland Juno-60, Rhodes, Moog synthesizers, and drum machines — his work bridges contemporary classical music and experimental electronic composition. He created Piano Day (the 88th day of the year), scored the film Victoria (2015), and released key albums including Felt (2011), Spaces (2013), and All Melody (2018). He works from Funkhaus studio in Berlin and releases on Erased Tapes Records.

Repetition Repetition was a Los Angeles-based electric minimalist duo comprising Ruben Garcia and Steve Caton, active in the mid-1980s. Their sparse, hypnotic recordings combined minimal guitar figures, drum machine patterns, and a dry, post-punk economy of means influenced by the Velvet Underground and West Coast minimalism. Original releases on Third Stone Music in 1987 remained largely obscure until Freedom To Spend reissued selected recordings on Fit for Consequences: Original Recordings, 1984–1987 (2025), making their work available to a new generation of listeners interested in minimal and lo-fi underground music.

Ilmar Laaban (1921–2000) was an Estonian poet and Surrealist who fled to Sweden after the Soviet occupation of Estonia, where he became a significant figure in Swedish and European literary culture. He translated Surrealist poets into Estonian and Swedish, and his own poetry combined Surrealist imagery with complex, multi-layered linguistic games. His sound poetry and vocal performances, drawing on his multilingual background, contributed significantly to Scandinavian experimental culture. He was also a significant art critic and cultural mediator between Estonian exile culture and the broader European avant-garde.

American noise musician and sound artist working in tape-based composition, harsh noise, and experimental electronics. His practice is built from manipulated recordings of industrial processes—grinding metal, electrical hum, and degraded magnetic media—shaped into compositions that balance extreme texture with deliberate pacing and structure. Releases have appeared on labels including New Forces, Anti-Everything, Hot Releases, and FTAM Productions. He has performed live at Sediment Arts in Richmond, Virginia, and is also an active member of the band Crazy Doberman.

Stereolab was a London-based group formed in 1990 by Tim Gane and Lætitia Sadier, drawing members from London and Paris. Working at the intersection of krautrock motorik rhythms, French pop, lounge music, and leftist politics, they developed a distinctive sound centred on organ drones, repetition, and Sadier's bilingual vocals. Releases on Duophonic and Elektra throughout the 1990s — Peng! (1992), Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements (1993), Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1996) — made them defining figures of the alternative and indie milieu. They went on hiatus in 2009 following the death of keyboardist Mary Hansen, and returned to recording and touring in 2019.

Born in Kassel in 1974, this Berlin-based musician and producer began performing with alternative rock groups in the mid-1990s before transitioning into electronic music. He released his debut EP as Efdemin on the Dial label in 2004 and relocated to Berlin in 2005, where he established a residency at Berghain. His albums—including Chicago (2010), Decay (2014), and New Atlantis (2019)—draw on minimalism, dub, deep house, and Detroit techno. He studied at the Institute for Computer Music in Vienna and operates his own label naïf.

Golan Levin (born 1972) is an American artist, composer, and technologist based in Pittsburgh. His work combines computer science, performance, and electronic music to create interactive audiovisual systems — works in which the audience's movement, voice, or presence generates sound and image in real time. His Messa di Voce (2003, with Zachary Lieberman) is a landmark of audiovisual art, mapping the human voice into visual form in performance. A professor at Carnegie Mellon University, he has exhibited and performed internationally and is a significant figure in the intersection of electronic music, new media art, and performance technology.

Marcus Pal is a Swedish-origin sound artist and composer working internationally, focused on harmonic sound, just intonation, and the phenomenology of tonal perception. He studied with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela in New York (2013–2014) at the Church Street Dream House and has been a regular collaborator with Catherine Christer Hennix since 2014. His theoretical work draws on 10th–11th-century Buddhist and Pratyabhijña Śaiva philosophy. He composes for acoustic instruments and digital synthesis and has presented work through Blank Forms, Fylkingen, and Amant.

Haus Arafna is a German industrial music duo comprising Ulrike and Peter Hauber, active since the early 1990s. Working in the tradition of power electronics and dark ambient, they construct claustrophobic, obsessive soundscapes from distorted electronics, drum machines, and Ulrike Hauber's distinctive, tormented vocals. Releasing primarily on Galakthorrö Records, their work — including Children of God (1993) and Lullabies (1996) — occupies a space between industrial, gothic, and noise that has built them a devoted cult following in European underground music. Their practice is notable for its uncompromising emotional extremity and the central role of female vocal performance.

Jani Christou (1926–1970) was a Greek composer whose brief career produced some of the most unusual and psychologically intense music of the post-war period. Influenced by C.G. Jung and ancient Greek ritual, his Praxis for 12 (1966) and Enantiodromia (1968) combined orchestral music with theatrical action, ritual elements, and psychological drama in ways that anticipated music theater. He died in a car accident at 43, leaving a small but remarkable body of work that has been periodically rediscovered by those interested in the intersection of music, drama, and psychology.

Born in Mexico City in 1957, he has been a defining figure in Mexican curatorial practice since 1981, with more than 300 exhibitions organised for public and private institutions in Mexico and internationally. He directed the Ex Teresa Arte Actual Museum and Experimental Museum El Eco, programming international festivals of action art and sound art, and later served as curatorial coordinator at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo at UNAM. He has taught museum studies and arts theory at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas and written extensively as a critic. His recent projects include major international art and football exhibitions at Museo Jumex.

CAN was a German experimental rock band formed in Cologne in 1968 by keyboardist Irmin Schmidt, bassist Holger Czukay, guitarist Michael Karoli, and drummer Jaki Liebefeld, with vocalist Malcolm Mooney and later Damo Suzuki. Working from a studio they called Inner Space, they developed a rhythmically propulsive, trance-oriented sound documented on albums including Monster Movie (1969), Tago Mago (1971), Ege Bamyasi (1972), and Future Days (1973). Their approach — extended improvisation edited into dense, hypnotic structures — was foundational for post-punk, electronic music, and the broader krautrock movement.

Louis (1920–1989) and Bebe (1925–2008) Barron were American pioneers of electronic music who composed the score for Forbidden Planet (1956), the first entirely electronic film score in Hollywood history, built by constructing custom electronic circuits and recording their sounds and failures onto magnetic tape. Working from their Greenwich Village studio, they treated electronic components as living systems whose behaviour and self-destruction provided sonic material for their compositions. Their collaboration with John Cage and the New York experimental music scene placed them within downtown New York's avant-garde, and the score's eerie timbres remain a landmark of early electronic music.

Robin Minard is a Canadian sound artist and composer born in 1953 in Montréal, based in Weimar, Germany since the 1990s. He is best known for large-scale sound installations using arrays of small piezoelectric speakers — sometimes hundreds or even thousands of them, distributed across walls, ceilings, floors and architectural surfaces — that together produce quiet, spatially diffused sonic environments of great delicacy and spatial complexity.

His installations invite a mode of listening that is ambulatory and distributed: the listener moves through the sound, which changes imperceptibly with position and proximity, rather than sitting before a fixed source.

Born in Tokyo in 1980 and based in Berlin since 2004, he studied political science and economics in Japan before taking up sound studies in Germany. In 2002 he co-founded The Sine Wave Orchestra, which received Honorary Mentions at Prix Ars Electronica in 2004 and 2019. He founded AUSREIHE in 2009, an independent organization dedicated to experimental electronic and computer music, and is active in the artist collective NK in Berlin. His work explores spatiality across physical, social, and political registers. Since 2020 he has been Professor of Sound Art at the Berlin University of the Arts.

Buttechno is a project of Pavel Milyakov, a Russian-born electronic musician based in Berlin. Working within a club-adjacent but structurally demanding framework, his music moves across industrial techno, harsh electronics, and abstracted dance forms. He releases on labels including Jazzve and other independent channels aligned with the Berlin and Eastern European experimental underground. His work addresses both the formal possibilities of rhythm and the political contexts of diaspora and displacement — he left Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. Buttechno is associated with the Гост Звук (Ghost Zvuk) collective in Moscow and collaborative circles in Berlin.

Toshiya Tsunoda is a Japanese sound artist and field recordist born in 1964 in Kanagawa. His practice centres on the investigation of physical vibration — resonance within objects, subsonic frequencies, and the behaviour of air in enclosed spaces — rather than landscape or atmosphere in the conventional field recording sense. Releases on Erstwhile, Presto!?, and his own label document this approach with characteristic rigour. His work has appeared in collaboration with Taku Unami and others, and he has written extensively on his methodology. He is considered one of the most distinctive voices in Japanese sound art.

The Mutoid Waste Company was a British art collective and sound system founded in London in the early 1980s, associated with the free festival and squatter movements and best known for large-scale mobile sculptures made from salvaged industrial waste. They became known for elaborate mechanical sculptures — robots, vehicles, and structures assembled from car engines, steel girders, and other debris — appearing at free parties and protests, combining rave music with pyrotechnics and theatrical staging. After police pressure forced them out of Britain in the late 1980s, they relocated to Berlin and later founded Mutonia, a settlement built from salvaged machinery in Santarcangelo, Italy.

Fernando Godoy is a sound artist, producer, and curator from Valparaíso, Chile, working at the intersection of listening, territory, and socio-environmental politics. He co-founded Tsonami Arte Sonoro in 2007, a Valparaíso-based organisation that promotes experimental sound practices, festivals, radio, and site-specific research. His production includes sound installation, performance, radio pieces, and experimental scores that treat the aural as a space of cultural and phenomenological inquiry. One of his performances addressed the collapse of coastal ecosystems in Valparaíso as a direct critique of the economic policies introduced under the Pinochet regime.

Ai Aso (朝生愛) is a Japanese singer and songwriter working at the intersection of psych-folk, avant-garde song, and drone. Based in Japan, she is closely affiliated with the underground rock scene centered around groups including Boris and White Heaven, with whom she has performed and collaborated over many years.

Her solo recordings are characterized by fragile, ethereal vocals set against spare guitar accompaniment — music that evokes lost memories and interior stillness, drawing on Japanese folk traditions while extending toward more experimental and psychedelic territories.

Born in the UK in 1983, Adam Asnan is an electroacoustic musician and location sound recordist based between London and Berlin. His work focuses on the aesthetic potential of sound capture and amplification — exploring concepts of phonogeny (a parallel to photogeny) in recording and producing works that instrumentalise reverb and spatial acoustics. He performs solo and as one third of VA AA LR, an electroacoustic trio with Vasco Alves and Louie Rice. His recordings have been released on SM-LL and Jungle Gym Records, and his compositions and performances have been presented at venues including Cafe OTO in London, ausland in Berlin, and Q-O2 in Brussels.

Ravensirkl is a raw, atmospheric black metal project from Germany, active since the early 2020s. Its music favours melodic, wintry guitar lines layered over lo-fi, rehearsal-room production, leaning toward an epic, mournful tone within the genre's underground tradition.

Its debut, Demo Rehearsal, recorded across 2021, comprises four tracks including The Hermit and Icarus Wings, released that December. The 2022 single Weltenschlange continued in this vein, and the five-track Kriemhild followed in November 2024, recorded 2022–2024 and drawing on Germanic legend for songs such as Himmelreich and Zwergenkönig.

Formed in Pori, Finland in 2015 by Toni-Pekka Iisakkala and Villepetteri Lammasniemi, Blood Chalice works within the traditions of war metal and death metal, combining boisterous riffs, unrelenting percussion, and guttural vocals. Their debut Demo 2016 was followed by releases on Regain Records. Thematically the project focuses on agony, despair, and mortality, drawing on the dark and confrontational aesthetics of the extreme metal underground. Flag: the file may refer to a different Blood Chalice; limited verifiable detail beyond the Finnish band.

Vomito Nuclear is a Mexican power electronics and noise project that has been active since the late 1990s. Working in the tradition of industrial and power electronics, the project produces confrontational recordings and performances combining distorted electronics, political provocation, and abrasive sound. Releases on Urashima and Hospital Productions have positioned them within an international noise underground while maintaining a specifically Latin American political perspective. Their work engages with violence, death, and political extremity through the aesthetic of noise.

Born in Bucharest in 1942, Rădulescu developed his spectral technique of composition — drawing on Byzantine and Hindu music alongside the physics of sound — before leaving Romania in 1969 to settle in Paris. Among his first Parisian works was Credo for nine cellos, employing his spectral methods. He attended Darmstadt courses given by Cage, Ligeti, Stockhausen, and Xenakis, and later studied computer-assisted composition at IRCAM. His catalogue of over 100 works includes six string quartets, five piano sonatas, and a piano concerto. His approach to spectral music is widely held to be distinct from those of French contemporaries Grisey and Murail. He died in Paris in 2008.

Yutaka Makino © Privat
Yutaka Makino was born in Tochigi, Japan in 1976. He studied Earth sciences, computer music and visual arts in Japan, Europe and the USA. He lives and works in Berlin.

Makino’s works have been shown in institutions and festivals such as Akademie der Künste, MärzMusik, Kontraste Krems, daadgalerie, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Transmediale, ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe, Sonic Acts, Japan Society, Issue Project Room, etc. He has received prizes, grants and residencies from the DAAD’s Artists-in-Berlin Program, Prix Ton Bruynèl, The MacDowell Colony, Japanese Agency of Cultural Affairs, Pola Art Foundation among others.

Tom Zé (born José Thomaz Pereira Júnior in 1936 in Irará, Bahia) is a Brazilian composer and singer who was a peripheral figure in the Tropicália movement of the late 1960s before being largely forgotten and then rediscovered. His albums for Philips in the late 1960s and early 1970s — including Grande Liquidação (1968) and Todos os Olhos (1973) — combined avant-garde experimentation with Brazilian popular song in ways that were too eccentric for commercial radio.

After years of obscurity, he was rediscovered by David Byrne, who signed him to Luaka Bop in the early 1990s.

Justice Yeldham (Lucas Abela) is an Australian performer known for his distinctive technique of playing amplified plate glass with his face — pressing his cheeks, chin, and lips against the surface to produce extreme sound through physical vibration. His performances are simultaneously compelling and alarming. He has also developed record-shaped instruments and other novel devices. Active in Australian underground performance and noise scenes and internationally, he occupies a unique position as both a genuine instrumentalist and a performance artist committed to the extremity of physical sound production.

Swiss sound artist, musician, and researcher based in Berlin, he completed a PhD in social anthropology at Bern University on sonic pluralism and ecological voices in Morocco. His practice uses field recording, performance, film, installation, and radio to examine the relations between sound, listening, power, and ideology in various cultural contexts. He has presented at Documenta 14 and exhibited internationally, earning two Swiss Art Awards (2012 and 2015) and a European Sound Art Prize in 2016. His film Salam Godzilla premiered at the Visions du Réel festival in 2019. He teaches in the Sound Studies Master programme at UDK Berlin.

Slikback is a Ugandan producer and DJ based in Nairobi, Kenya. Working across extreme club music, footwork, and industrial-adjacent electronic forms, his productions combine sub-bass weight, fragmented percussion, and a distinctly East African urban sensibility. He releases on Hakuna Kulala — the Kampala-based label that has been central to the Nyege Nyege collective — alongside international labels including Demdike Stare's DDS imprint. He has performed at Nyege Nyege Festival and internationally, and is one of the most distinctive voices in the current East African experimental club music scene.

Family Ravine is a project of Kevin Cahill, a Canadian musician based in Toronto where he established the Power Moves series of labels and released music under numerous aliases. Under the Family Ravine name, Cahill works across free folk, experimental songwriting, and avant-garde improvisation. Albums including Horizonites and Wet Lands Dry Me draw on bluegrass, folk, and more abstract traditions, operating at both intimate and expansive scales. He also released Away and Instinct on the Round Bale Recordings imprint. His work shifts between the microscopic detail of quiet acoustic moments and broader, more chaotic sonic fields, rooted in the landscapes and musical communities of Ontario.

Co-founder of the Mexico City synth-cabaret duo María Bonita alongside his brother Mateo Lafontaine, Mario Lafontaine González shaped the project's lyrics and vocals between 1982 and 1984, blending electronics with cabaret theatrics and absurdist performance in the city's LGBTQ+ underground. After that run he built a career as creative director and music specialist, spending over two decades on Luis de Llano's team at Televisa and designing artwork for more than sixty albums, including Caifanes' debut and Fobia's Mundo Feliz. He has worked as a music commentator alongside Horacio Villalobos across Telehit, MVS, and ADN 40, and currently co-hosts Old's Kool on 106.5 Mix FM in Mexico City.

Joanna Newsom (born 1982) is an American singer, songwriter, and harpist from Nevada City, California. Trained in classical piano and harp, she developed a practice that integrates the harp as a primary compositional instrument with dense, allusive poetry and a distinctive, high-register vocal style. Her debut The Milk-Eyed Mender (2004) established her within the freak-folk milieu; the orchestral Ys (2006) — arranged by Van Dyke Parks — and the triple album Have One on Me (2010) extended her scope into genuinely ambitious long-form narrative songwriting. She is among the most compositionally inventive figures in contemporary American folk music.

Otim Alpha is a musician from Gulu, northern Uganda who has developed and popularized Acholitronix — a fusion of traditional instruments used by the Acholi people with electronic music production. He has long worked as a wedding singer, writing bespoke songs for hundreds of couples across his home region, maintaining the communal function of music within his local context while also developing it into a form with international resonance.

His music combines the percussion and melodic patterns of Acholi traditional music with electronic beats and production techniques, creating a hybrid form that is both culturally specific and genuinely innovative.

DJ Froggy69, Samu Goldbourne, is a DJ and artist based in Kassel, Germany, embedded in the experimental music scene of the city. His practice moves across underground club music, sound art, and DJ culture. He has performed at the RANGE Festival, Kassel's annual platform for experimental music, sound art, installations, and performance, which has anchored an active community of sound artists in the city. Approaching the DJ set as a curatorial and performative act, he works at the intersection of dancefloor practice and experimental listening contexts.

Ukrainian black metal project founded in 2018 by Dmitry Marchenko in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, now operating from Berlin. The debut release Through the Branches to Eternity introduced a signature that places raw, aggressive songwriting alongside quiet, intimate ballads. Subsequent albums Night and Love and Pale Swordsman (2021) deepened this contrast, drawing on second-wave black metal, neo-folk, and hip-hop. Morning Star, issued on Sacred Bones Records, brought broader critical attention, with reviewers noting its immersive, melancholic quality and emotional candour.

Yoshi Wada (1943–2021) was a Japanese-American Fluxus artist and sound sculptor born in Kyoto and based in New York. Joining the Fluxus movement in 1968 after meeting George Maciunas, he studied with La Monte Young and with North Indian vocalist Pandit Pran Nath. His practice centred on drone, sustained overtone environments, and custom instruments: metal pipe horns up to twenty feet long, large reed instruments named the Alligator and Elephantine Crocodile, and Scottish highland bagpipes. His landmark installation The Appointed Cloud (1987) filled the Great Hall of the New York Hall of Science with computer-controlled pipe organ sound.

Greek sound practitioner and researcher based in London, Maria Papadomanolaki studied linguistics at the Aristoteleion University of Thessaloniki before completing a PhD in Sonic Perceptual Ecologies at CRISAP, London College of Communication. Her work spans sound installation, networked performance, transmission art, and sound design for dance and film, with an ongoing focus on listening, environment, and placemaking. She is co-founder of the artist collective SoundCamp and a member of the Shortwave Collective. She serves as Senior Lecturer and Course Leader for Digital Music and Sound Arts at the University of Brighton.

Based in Copenhagen and born in 1990, this composer and visual artist works across sound, digital media, and installation, with listening at the core of her practice. Her sonic work avoids linearity in favor of improvisation, intuition, and the space where understanding becomes somatic. She has created interactive pieces that probe how societal structures impact the body, including Harmony AI (2018), an interactive choir piece with video projection and Arduino sensors. She works with the collective Sonth and has been active in Bureau for Listening curatorial projects.

Based in Hong Kong, this artist and researcher makes work across sound installation, robotics, kinetic sculpture, and generative systems, exploring how technology mediates perception. She holds an MFA from UCLA and an MA from Central Saint Martins. Her early sound installation Translucent Noise (2008) introduced her to wider audiences, and subsequent pieces including Granular Graph (2009) engaged physical acoustics through mechanical systems. She received Young Artist of the Year in Media Arts from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council in 2012 and Artist of the Year in 2022, and was awarded the Audemars Piguet Art Commission in 2021.

Born in Cleveland in 1929, Jalacy Hawkins was an orphan raised by a Blackfoot family who taught himself piano as a toddler and studied opera before serving in the US Army, where he became middleweight boxing champion of Alaska in 1949. His 1956 OKeh Records single 'I Put a Spell on You' — recorded in a drunken session that transformed a love ballad into a howling incantation — launched his signature character: a voodoo showman who rose from a coffin wielding a smoking skull on a stick called Henry. That theatricality made him a godfather of shock rock and an influence on Alice Cooper, Tom Waits, and the Cramps.

Scanner is the alias of Robin Rimbaud (born 1964), a British sound artist and composer based in London. From the early 1990s he scanned radio frequencies and mobile telephone conversations (before encryption became standard) and wove the captured transmissions into electronic compositions — a practice generating significant discussion about surveillance, privacy, and public space. Albums including Scanner (1992), Delivery (1994), and Mass Observation (1994) on Sub Rosa established his reputation. He has since worked extensively in contemporary dance, theatre, film, and visual arts, collaborating with artists including Mike Kelley and Michael Nyman.

Born in 1958, he is a French curator who began his career as an assistant curator at the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Marseille between 1996 and 2001. From 2001 to 2015 he was associated with Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, initially heading the registration department and later curating exhibitions including Esquiador en el fondo de un pozo (2006) and Turn off the Sun (2013). His independent curatorial practice spans Latin America and Europe, and his writing has appeared in publications including Mouvement, Espacio, and La Tempestad.

Annea Lockwood (b. 1939, Christchurch, New Zealand) is a composer and sound artist whose work has been consistently innovative and deeply attentive to the natural world for over six decades. She studied at the Royal College of Music in London and with Gottfried Michael Koenig at Bilthoven, and taught at Vassar College in New York for many years. Her Piano Transplants series (1969–72) placed instruments outdoors to be played by fire, water, and fauna. Her River Archive, begun in 1966, developed into three landmark sound map installations: of the Hudson (1982), the Danube (2005), and the Housatonic (2009).

Born in France in 1970, this Japanese artist based in Paris works across sound composition, video, and installation, seeking new forms of language between distinct artistic practices. He has hosted the radio programme Epsilonia on Radio Libertaire in Paris since 1993 and co-founded the improvised music group GOL in 1989. A founding member of the mobile laboratory OuUnPo since 2009, he completed a residency at 18th Street Arts Center in Los Angeles in 2004, where he developed Cortical House, a project combining acoustic and visual elements into an imagined extension of the mind.

Raised in Colorado and based in San Francisco since 1984, she is a composer, performer, and media artist known for works that layer live voice through electronic processing, looping, and gestural MIDI controllers. Her performances combine operatic technique and extended vocal methods with real-time signal manipulation, often accompanied by video projection. Albums include Echolocation (1987), A Delay is Better (2004), and A Secret Code (2021). She has performed at La Biennale di Venezia and Bang on a Can at Lincoln Center, and has received the Rome Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Gabber Eleganza is the project of Italian DJ, producer, and creative director Alberto Guerrini, active since 2011 and one of the most prominent figures in the contemporary resurgence of gabber aesthetics. His practice operates simultaneously as DJ work, music production, and cultural criticism, treating the history of gabber — the extreme high-BPM electronic music that emerged from Rotterdam in the early 1990s and developed significant communities across Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium — as a subject of sustained investigation and reactivation. Based in Berlin, Guerrini connects this history with club culture, queer aesthetics, and the visual language of hardcore and post-rave fashion.

Fe-Mail is a Norwegian duo comprising Maja Ratkje and Hild Sofie Tafjord, formed in 2000. Working with voice, French horn, and electronics, they produce extreme noise and free improvisation characterised by intense physicality and a commitment to pushing their instruments and bodies to their limits. Their releases on Rune Grammofon and Blossoming Noise are documents of a feminist noise practice that refuses both the domestication of experimental music and the conventional masculinity of much noise underground. The duo's work has been influential on subsequent generations of Norwegian experimental musicians.

Fourtwnty is an Indonesian folk-pop group formed in Jakarta in 2010, built around a blend of reggae, folk, rock, and hip-hop that gives their songs a loose, contemplative texture. Their debut album Lelaku appeared in 2015, and their song Zona Nyaman reached the top of Indonesian charts in 2018. Their third studio album Nalar (2023) earned a nomination at the Anugerah Musik Indonesia for Best Pop Duo/Group, with the track Nematomorpha drawing particular attention. The group have built a dedicated following across Indonesia through their mellow arrangements and introspective lyrics rooted in everyday life and natural imagery.

Conceived by Basque musician Mattin, Billy Bao is a Bilbao-based noise rock band built around a fictional Nigerian emigre vocalist persona — a Lagosian troubadour called William who supposedly arrived in Bilbao and fell into the local punk scene. The actual lineup features Mattin and Xabier Erkizia on guitars and Alberto Lopez on drums. Their music merges harsh, feedback-driven noise with an explicitly anti-capitalist politics. Key releases include Dialectics of Shit (Parts Unknown, 2008), MAY 08 (2009), and The Lagos Sessions (2015).

André Vida is a saxophonist, composer and improviser whose dynamic practice bridges jazz, experimental electronics and performance. His collaborative, boundary-crossing projects continually expand the expressive possibilities of the instrument. He remains a vital force in contemporary improvisation through energetic, innovative approaches. Working extensively in European free jazz and noise contexts, he has collaborated with fellow improvisers across generations, contributing to a rich lineage of extended saxophone practice that connects Coltrane, the AACM, and European free music.

Born in Mexico in 1978, Arturo Hernández Alcázar is a multidisciplinary artist whose work engages with processes of erosion, fragmentation, explosion, and pulverization as both material phenomena and conceptual frameworks. He collects fragments, remnants, and archival materials to construct temporary assemblages and precarious sculptures that make critical statements about contemporary political contexts. His international solo presentations include No trabajes Nunca at MUAC, UNAM, Mexico City (2010), Falling Remains at Kunstraum München, Berlin (2016), and Stillness in the Storm at Museum Voorlinden, Netherlands (2025). He has also shown at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Australia.

Born in Berlin in 1931, he fled Nazi Germany as a child and arrived in New York in the early 1950s, where he moved in Abstract Expressionist circles alongside Jackson Pollock and Adolph Gottlieb. He turned to sound art in the 1960s and built the steel cello and bow chimes — large flexible sheet metal panels fitted with strings or rods played with a cello bow, which he called American industrial folk instruments. In 1976 he founded the Robert Rutman US Steel Cello Ensemble in Boston and performed at venues including Lincoln Center and the United Nations Sculpture Garden. He also toured and recorded with Einstürzende Neubauten, and died in 2021.

Violent Onsen Geisha is the project of Japanese musician Haino Masaya, active in the Japanese noise underground since the late 1980s. The name translates roughly as Violent Hot Spring Geisha — a deliberately incongruous combination — and the music combines the approach of Japanese noise with psychedelic, abstract, and chaotic elements that distinguish it from the more systematic harsh noise of other practitioners.

Masaya has released prolifically on Japanese noise labels and internationally, producing work that ranges from extreme sonic chaos to more meditative and psychedelic territories.

Born in Denver, Colorado in 1959 and relocating to Vancouver in the late 1970s, he founded The Haters on 1 May 1979 with an inaugural performance called Alluring at a small New York gallery, making it one of the earliest sustained projects in the modern noise scene. He is the group's sole permanent member, performing with masked collaborators drawn from local experimental circles. The work centres on themes of entropy and decay, using heavy machinery amplified into virtually unrecognisable sound. He has appeared on more than 300 releases, designed sound for Mark Pauline's Survival Research Laboratories in the 1990s, and released his first feature film A Noisy Delivery in 2013.

Leafcutter John is the alias of John Burton, a British musician and software developer based in London. Releasing on Planet Mu in the 2000s, he developed a delicate electroacoustic sound built on laptop processing, acoustic guitar, piano, and found sounds — music of extreme sensitivity and textural inventiveness. Albums The Forest and the Sea (2003) and Resurrection Sound System (2006) were critically noted for their originality and emotional warmth. He also developed his own software instrument Côte, which allows physical gesture to control sound. His practice bridges the worlds of software development, acoustic performance, and studio composition.

SHXCXCHCXSH is a Swedish techno duo who have released on Avian, MORD, and Northern Electronics since 2013. Their sound combines industrial techno with noise, drone, glitch, and broken beats — what they describe as deadly serious techno that moves across dancefloor functionality and darker ambient registers. Their debut album STRGTHS (2013) established their unpronounceable name as a marker of deliberate illegibility: as self-described logophiles, they contort language into splintered character sequences that resist easy categorisation. Their work distorts club contexts by applying an exceptionally idiosyncratic and refined palette to the materials of underground techno.

Born on 8 November 1931 in Kaunas, Lithuania, and emigrating with his family to the United States in 1948, he studied architecture, art history, graphic design, and musicology at Cooper Union, Carnegie Tech, and NYU over eleven years. In 1960, attending Richard Maxfield composition classes at the New School, he met La Monte Young, Al Hansen, and Allan Kaprow. The following year he named and launched Fluxus, organising its first festivals in Europe and producing the influential Fluxus Editions series. He died on 9 May 1978 in Boston, leaving behind SoHo's first artist cooperatives as a further legacy.

Born Klaus Sperber in Immenstadt, Bavaria in 1944, he moved to New York at the age of 28 and worked as a pastry chef while building his alien stage persona. A countertenor of extraordinary range, he broke through in November 1978 performing at the New Wave Vaudeville revue in the East Village, and in 1979 appeared as a backing singer for David Bowie on Saturday Night Live. His RCA Victor albums Klaus Nomi and Simple Man blended synthesizer-laden operatic passages with covers of 1960s pop standards. He died in August 1983, one of the first public figures to succumb to AIDS.

Born in Essex and based in Berlin, she studied zoology before discovering electronic music through an acid house recording studio in Nottingham. Drawn to computer glitches and unexpected sound rather than conventional rhythm, she developed a practice spanning live electronics, site-specific performance, and installation. In 2005 she invented the Sonic Bed, a vibrating furniture interface for spatial listening, later expanding to sonic bikes and benches. Her 2004 collaboration Weightless Animals received a BAFTA, and she was awarded an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica 2006. She was the first woman to hold the Edgar Varèse guest professorship in computer music at TU Berlin.

Txema González is a Spanish field recordist and ethnomusicologist based in the Basque Country. His documentary recordings focus on traditional and ceremonial music of Afro-Colombian and other Latin American communities, capturing ritual practices that are often undocumented. His work on Alabaos y Gualíes: Dirges and Funeral Rites in the Afro-Colombian Pacific (Death Is Not The End, 2025), recorded at the Encuentro de Alabaos y Gualíes de Andagoya in Chocó, Colombia, documents alabaos, gualíes, and levantamientos de tumba — burial rites of Afro-Colombian Pacific communities performed to accompany the dead and their relatives.

Cat Woywod is an artist based in Kassel and Mainz working with voice, sound, light, field recordings, and objects in practice they describe as amphibious—fluid between genres, disciplines, and identities. They use it/them pronouns. Woywod completed a BA in Fine Arts with distinction from the Kunsthochschule Kassel in 2023, specializing in sound and multisensory works, and from 2024 is undertaking a Meisterschüler postgraduate in Sound Art and Composition at the Hochschule für Musik Mainz with Prof. Peter Kiefer. They performed at documenta14 in 2017 for works by Pope L. and Georgia Sagri. Their work draws on experimental music and queer temporal frames, treating sound as fluid.

Krista Bourgeois is an American-born industrial techno performer, producer, and DJ based in Rotterdam. Built around a fully modular instrument of her own design, her live sets merge mechanised sound design, hardcore rhythms, industrial noise, and analogue warmth into a precision-driven physical experience. She has released on PRSPCT, Karnage, Rebekah's Go Hard or Go Hardcore, Gabber Industries Berlin, and SOMA. She is the founder of Somnium Recordings, a flinta*-focused label and audio-visual platform launched in 2023 dedicated to raw dystopian textures and heavy industrial soundscapes.

Richard Hamilton (1922–2011) was a British artist widely considered a founding figure of Pop Art, whose influence extends across painting, printmaking, collage, installation and digital media over six decades. A member of the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in the early 1950s — alongside Lawrence Alloway, Eduardo Paolozzi, Alison and Peter Smithson — his collage Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956), made for the This Is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, is one of the most cited works in the history of post-war art.

Xenia Pestova Bennett is a pianist, composer, and researcher specialising in contemporary and electroacoustic music, based in the UK. Her work with prepared piano, electronics, and multimedia has been documented on Metier, Ravello, and other labels. Ed Bennett is a British composer whose music engages with experimental notation, electronics, and mixed media. Together they have collaborated on works that explore the acoustic and electronic dimensions of the piano and the voice. Pestova Bennett has also worked on numerous premieres and research projects relating to extended performance practice.

Destroy All Monsters was an American experimental rock and noise band formed in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1973 by Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Carey Loren, and Niagara. The members met in the art department of the University of Michigan, sharing a milieu that sat between art theory, garage rock, and underground cinema. Their name came from a late-1960s Japanese B-movie.

The original lineup was active from 1973 to 1976, producing recordings that synthesized musique concrète, garage rock, schlock horror imagery, and Dadaist performance.

Irish electronic musician and composer who began producing music in 1989 and emerged as an internationally recognised figure in minimal techno around 2000, after completing a philosophy degree and immersing himself in the work of Steve Reich and John Cage. He founded the label Minimise in 1999 and released Growing Up In Public and Together Is The New Alone on Force Inc and Mille Plateaux. His Colorseries in 2004 brought wide recognition, followed by 6x6=36 (2006) and It Simply Is/Trust (2008). His meticulous structures draw on Chicago House, Detroit Techno, and UK Ambient Techno, combining vintage studio equipment with computer-assisted precision.

Harry Partch (1901–1974) was an American composer and instrument builder who rejected twelve-tone equal temperament in favour of a 43-tone just intonation scale. Unable to realise his music on existing instruments, he constructed his own — among them the Chromelodeon, the Quadrangularis Reversum, and the Spoils of War, built from found objects. His music drew on American hobo culture, ancient Greek drama, and world music traditions, aiming at a unified corporeal art combining song, dance, and speech. Works including Barstow (1941) and Delusion of the Fury (1966) remain outside the mainstream but deeply influential on just intonation and experimental composition.

Brussels-based artist and curator Frédéric Van de Velde co-founded and co-runs Futura Resistenza, a record label operating across Belgium and the Netherlands that works at the intersection of performance, sound, visual art, and experimental music. He was previously involved with WORM in Rotterdam, where he moved from volunteer coordination to floor management and show programming, building a network that spans improvisation, noise, and interdisciplinary sound practices. He is the artistic coordinator of OORtreders Festival, a three-day gathering for art and sound held in the forests of North Limburg, and is part of a duo also featuring artist Nele Möller.

Zhiqi is a sound artist and electronic musician working in the field of experimental and noise music. Their practice engages with the sonic possibilities of electronics, synthesis, and improvisation, creating works that occupy the space between structured composition and spontaneous exploration. Active in underground and independent music contexts, Zhiqi has developed a body of work characterized by attention to texture, materiality, and the affective dimensions of electronic sound. Performances and recordings situate the project within an international network pushing the boundaries of what electronic music can sound like, treating each release as a step in an open-ended exploration.

Arnold Dreyblatt (b. 1953, New York) is an American composer and visual artist based in Berlin who has developed one of the most distinctive voices in post-minimalist experimental music. His work centers on specially constructed and modified instruments — including a modified double bass with wire strings and bowed metallic objects — that generate rich harmonic overtone series based on just intonation.

Dreyblatt founded his Orchestra of Excited Strings in New York in the late 1970s, and subsequently relocated to Berlin where the group has continued to perform.

Nurse With Wound is a British experimental music project centred on Steven Stapleton, formed in London in 1978 alongside John Fothergill and Heman Pathak. Beginning with the influential list of avant-garde and obscure references included in their debut Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella (1979), the project has since moved across surrealist collage, tape manipulation, musique concrète, and dark ambient through a vast catalogue. Stapleton has collaborated extensively, including long-running work with Colin Potter. The United Dairies label has been central to their releases.

Born in Tokyo in 1971 and trained in musicology at the Kunitachi College of Music, he relocated to Berlin in 2003 and developed a practice centered on fragile, unstable acoustic phenomena produced by everyday objects and technological media. His performances and installations investigate the threshold between ambient sound and deliberate intervention, coaxing barely audible events from materials that would ordinarily pass unnoticed. He has shown work at transmediale in Berlin and the Experimental Music Festival in Munich, and has collaborated with Takehisa Kosugi, Francesco Cavaliere, and other figures across international improvisation and sound art circuits.

Alexander Robotnick is the alias of Maurizio Dami, an Italian electronic musician and DJ born in 1950. Beginning in jazz guitar before moving to electronics at 27, he released Problèmes d'amour in 1983 — a foundational track of Italo disco that would later influence Chicago house and Detroit techno, and remains a reference in the history of electronic dance music. Rediscovered online in the late 1990s, he launched a DJ career in 2003 and runs the Hot Elephant Music label. He performs at clubs including Berghain, Fabric, and the Movement Festival.

Kate Carr is an Australian sound artist and label operator based in London whose practice spans field recording, electronic composition, and curatorial work. She runs Flaming Pines, a label dedicated to field recording and sound art. Her recordings — including It was a morning in summer and I was eating a soft boiled egg (2011) and Winds and Leaves (2012) — treat field recording with lyrical sensitivity. Her label has released important work by international artists, contributing significantly to the culture of field recording and environmental sound art globally.

Born in 1879 in Kyiv to a family of Polish origin, he studied briefly at the Stroganov School in Moscow and later at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. In 1915 he exhibited Black Square at the Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 in Petrograd, placing it in the corner position traditionally reserved for religious icons. The painting became the founding declaration of Suprematism, his theory of pure geometric abstraction as a spiritual and revolutionary form. He visited the West in 1927, exhibiting at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. He died in Leningrad in 1935.

Formed in 1999 in Little Rock, Arkansas by Chip King and Lee Buford, The Body relocated to Providence, Rhode Island and later Portland, Oregon, building one of the most singular bodies of work in experimental heavy music. King plays guitar and vocals, Buford plays drums and programming, and the duo has incorporated gospel choirs, industrial electronics, and noise elements into a practice rooted in sludge metal. Prolific collaborators, they have recorded with Full of Hell, Thou, Lingua Ignota, and Uniform, and released material on Thrill Jockey among many other labels.

A media historian and curator based in Berlin, her research centres on Visual Music, avant-garde film, and audiovisual live performance. She worked as a researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research in Linz, contributing to the See This Sound project examining the relation of image and sound in art, media, and perception. Together with Dieter Daniels she co-edited Audiovisuology: Compendium, an interdisciplinary survey of audiovisual culture, and the companion volume Audiovisuology 2: Essays. Histories and Theories of Audiovisual Media and Art.

Organza Ray is the duo of Hilary Jeffery and Eleni Poulou, active since 2022 and based in Berlin. Their practice develops through improvised conversation, layering trombone, trumpet, electronics, and synthesiser across studio and live settings — often extending into collaborative work with other musicians and artists. Eleni Poulou is known for her work with The Fall and her radio programmes Elope (Cashmere Radio) and Kastra (Stegi Radio). Hilary Jeffery performs internationally across theatres, clubs, festivals, and outdoor spaces. Releases include Purple & Green (2022), Bridge Call (2022), and Side Language Passage with Pyrolator (2025).

Born in 1978 in Hiroshima, he studied acoustic design at Kyushu Institute of Design, completing his graduate studies in 2004. Based in Tokyo, he creates performances and installations from physical phenomena including sound, light, magnetism, and mechanical movement, using electromagnets, motors, LEDs, and custom circuits to transfer energy between these elements. His self-built machines generate spontaneous interactions between objects, sound, and light. He has presented work internationally at Sonar Barcelona, Images Festival Toronto, and numerous Japanese institutions, and also develops electronic instruments combining user interface with physical vibration for commissioned projects.

The Rita is the harsh noise wall project of Canadian artist Sam McKinlay, active since the mid-1990s and one of the most rigorously theorised practitioners of the form. HNW — harsh noise wall — denotes a genre defined by static, unmodulated walls of sound that refuse the dynamics of composition, instead sustaining a maximal density in which all movement is simultaneously present and cancelled. McKinlay's practice is shaped by an engagement with extreme cinema, sexuality, and physicality, treating the noise wall as inseparable from the endurance it demands. His prolific output of dozens of releases pushed past the genre's conventions, even as others adopted the HNW template he helped create.

Tetsuya Umeda (b. 1980, Kumamoto, Japan) is a sound artist based in Osaka, working at the intersection of installation and performance. Active since the early 2000s, he constructs site-specific assemblages from everyday objects, such as fans, balloons, tin cans, and dog whistles, wired together with minimal electronics to generate sound through gravity, airflow, and chance.

His pieces unfold visibly before audiences, reflecting the particular conditions of each space and moment. Umeda has performed and exhibited internationally, including at the Yokohama Triennale and Aichi Triennale, and was co-recipient of the Tokyo Contemporary Art Award alongside Haji Oh.

Based in Mexico City, Alina Maldonado is a sound artist and musician who combines violin with electronics, applying extended and traditional techniques to create noise-rich textures and improvised structures. Her practice questions the limits of classical training, exploring sensations, identity, and musical language through what she calls a nomadic aesthetic in which improvisation plays a central role. Her project Líneas de Fuga pairs violin with live electronics. Her recordings include the albums Ver las voces, escuchar al fuego and El sonido no llena el espacio, lo crea, released on Bandcamp.

Born in France in 1981, he lives and works in Paris and has built a presence in Berlins experimental underground through performances emphasizing texture, frequencies, and field recordings. His practice moves between drawing, sculpture, and sound, with work exhibited at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and presented at the 10th Berlin Biennale. He runs the Razzle Dazzle label and is one half of the Sleep Disorders duo. Since 2005 his work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions across Europe and Southeast Asia.

Founded in Osaka in 1979 by guitarist Jojo Hiroshige, Hijōkaidan (非常階段, meaning emergency staircase) began as a performance art group whose anarchic shows involved destruction of equipment, food being thrown, and general institutional provocation. The lineup has ranged from two members to as many as fourteen; regular collaborators include Hiroshige's wife Junko and Toshiji Mikawa of Incapacitants. Over time the group refined its approach into a dense, focused wall of noise. Hiroshige founded the Osaka label Alchemy Records in 1984 to release their work alongside that of Hanatarash, Masonna, Incapacitants, Merzbow, and the Nihilist Spasm Band.

Corrupted is a Japanese sludge and doom metal band active since 1994 in Osaka. They are notable for their extremely slow, heavy music — often lasting well over an hour per piece — combined with lyrics sung almost entirely in Spanish despite having no direct connection to Spanish-speaking cultures. This deliberate linguistic displacement is one expression of their broader commitment to anti-commercial, anti-spectacular values.

The band has maintained an adamant refusal to do interviews, professional photo shoots, or any form of conventional publicity. They operate outside of the usual channels of metal promotion and have rarely toured despite a career spanning over twenty years.

ZULI (Ahmed El Ghazoly) is an Egyptian producer and DJ based in Cairo. His music merges the structural demands of club music with noise, industrial electronics, and a dissonant intensity that reflects both the global club underground and specifically Egyptian urban experience. Releases on The Vinyl Factory, Haunter Records, and other labels including his Terminal debut (2018) established him as one of the most distinctive voices in the Arabic-speaking world's experimental electronic music scene. He performs internationally and is closely associated with Cairo's underground music and arts community, as well as the Nyege Nyege network.

Born in Toronto in 1928, he was a Canadian artist whose practice spanned film, painting, sculpture, photography, and music, and who became one of the most influential figures in structural cinema. His 1967 film Wavelength, a 45-minute zoom across a New York loft accompanied by a sustained sine wave, won the Grand Prize at the Knokke experimental film festival in Belgium. La Région Centrale (1971) used a remote-controlled robotic camera arm to film the Quebec wilderness in continuous sweeping arcs. He returned to Canada in the early 1970s an established figure across multiple disciplines and died in Toronto in January 2023 at the age of 94.

Born in Ružomberok, Slovakia in 1946, he was a composer, musicologist, and conceptual artist who became a central figure in experimental music and visual poetry in Central Europe. He studied cello at the Conservatory in Žilina and musicology at Comenius University Bratislava, and from 1972 worked as a researcher at the Institute of Musical Studies of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. His graphic scores, sound objects, and action art projects connected him to the international Fluxus network, and he maintained a personal artistic friendship with John Cage across the Iron Curtain from the mid-1960s. He died in 2017.

Born on 8 January 1905 in Pitelli near La Spezia, he studied in Vienna with Arnold Schoenberg's pupil Walther Klein and became the first Italian exponent of twelve-tone technique before abandoning it entirely. After a mental breakdown in the late 1940s he turned to Eastern mysticism, Theosophy, and extended meditation, developing a compositional method focused on the inner life of a single note explored through microtonal oscillations, timbre changes, and dynamics. His Quattro pezzi su una nota sola (1959) exemplifies this approach. He died on 9 August 1988 in Rome, his work largely unrecognised until the final years of his life.

Grischa Lichtenberger is a German electronic musician and visual artist based in Berlin, releasing on Raster-Noton. His work with digital fragments, glitch, and rhythmic abstraction draws on both club music and the procedural aesthetics of the Raster-Noton label, while maintaining a more personal and emotionally charged quality than is often associated with that context. Albums including ∑(noosphere) (2013) and Re/Marks (2016) document an evolving practice that engages critically with digital excess and the accumulation of data-derived sound. He has performed and exhibited internationally.

Henning Christiansen (1932–2008) was a Danish composer and Fluxus artist who produced one of the most extensive and undervalued bodies of work in post-war European experimental music, ranging from tape pieces and electronic compositions through performance scores, film music, and large-scale collaborative actions. He was a founding member of the Fluxus movement in Europe, participating in the earliest Fluxus concerts in Wiesbaden in 1962. His long collaboration with Joseph Beuys — particularly the joint actions Eurasia (1966) — represent a significant chapter in both artists' careers.

Cris Cheek is a British-American poet, performer and sound artist born in 1955 in Enfield, London. Beginning in the mid-1970s, he worked alongside Bill Griffiths and Bob Cobbing at the Poetry Society printshop and with the Writers Forum group, co-founding the performance poetry collective known as jgjgjgjgjgjgjg. In 1981 he was among the founders of Chisenhale Dance Space. His collaborative electronic music work includes the trio Slant with Philip Jeck and Sianed Jones, and a BBC Radio 3 programme on Madagascar that won a Sony Gold Specialist Award in 1995. He taught performance writing at Dartington College of Arts and has been a professor at Miami University in Ohio.

Born in Lauenburg in 1944, he produced more than 600 works in just five years before dying of cancer in Frankfurt am Main in 1968 at the age of 23. His practice was organised around the principle of unvaried serial repetition applied to commercial imagery, typography, film, and sound. His Film-Montages I–III (1965) assembled fragments of television advertisements on 16mm to create time structures related to serial music, while his photocollages derived largely from printer proofs for a 1964 advertising campaign. Though he refused association with any specific movement, his work anticipated conceptual art and minimalism.

Born in Lima, Peru in 1980, Maria Chávez grew up in Texas and began working with turntables as a teenager in Houston, developing what she calls abstract turntablism — a practice rooted in chance, failure, and Deep Listening as taught by her late mentor Pauline Oliveros. She is the only practitioner who performs with the RAKE Double Needle, a rare device with two needles on one head that reads two segments of a record simultaneously. Her 2012 book Of Technique: Chance Procedures on Turntable, which she wrote and illustrated herself, documents her methods. She is based in New York.

Kode9 is the alias of Steve Goodman, a Scottish theorist, DJ, and producer based in London and founder of Hyperdub Records. The Space Ape (Stephen Samuel Gordon, 1972–2014) was a poet and MC whose deep, unhurried vocal delivery was the lyrical voice of Kode9's productions. Together they released Memories of the Future (2006) and Black Sun (2012) — dense, futurist dubstep and grime productions building a sonic mythology of urban alienation and science-fiction speculation. The Space Ape died of cancer in 2014. Goodman has continued as Kode9 and through Hyperdub, releasing and supporting music that has defined the post-dubstep experimental club landscape.

Mike Parker is an American electronic musician based in New York. Working in a space that merges industrial techno, minimal techno, and deep electronic composition, his productions on Geophone and other labels pursue an inward, almost ritualistic listening experience. Albums including Dispatches from the Metaphysical (2012) and Lustrations (2017) are dense with sub-bass and slowly evolving pattern structures. His music is associated with a strand of New York techno that traces connections to early Detroit while pursuing more abstract and psychedelic effects. He has influenced a generation of producers working between club and experimental electronic contexts.

Philip Corner is an American composer, pianist, trombonist and calligrapher born in 1933 in the Bronx, New York, based in Reggio Emilia, Italy since 1992. A central figure in the Fluxus movement from its earliest years in the 1960s, he studied with Henry Cowell, Olivier Messiaen and Henry Brant, and has subsequently produced hundreds of scores, performance works and graphic compositions across six decades of activity.

His works range from simple text instructions and meditative open forms to extended graphic notation, percussion pieces and interdisciplinary performance.

Born in the Netherlands in 1982, Mariska de Groot holds a BA in graphic design from Arnhem and a master's diploma from the ArtScience interfaculty in The Hague, where she lives and works. Her practice centres on handbuilt analog instruments that convert light into sound, drawing on the history of optical sound and early media inventions. The spinning patterns of her tone wheels are projected as light on the floor, becoming both instrument surface and performance space. She is a board member of iii (instrument inventors initiative) and has presented work at Ars Electronica, Atonal, and STEIM.

Dengue Dengue Dengue is a Peruvian electronic music duo from Lima comprising Rafael Pereira Santa Cruz and Felipe Salmon. Working with tropical bass music — chicha, cumbia, and Afro-Peruvian rhythms processed through analogue synthesisers and electronic production — they have developed a sound that is simultaneously rooted in Andean and coastal Peruvian music traditions and fully contemporary as club and festival music. Releasing on Shika Shika and other labels, their productions have positioned them as key figures in the Latin electronic underground and in international discussions of global bass music.

Born Götz Gustav Ksinski in Germany on 28 October 1922, he fled Nazi persecution to reach Mandatory Palestine days before Kristallnacht in 1938 and later settled in Los Angeles, where he studied composition and worked on Broadway productions. With French musician Jean-Jacques Perrey, he formed the duo Perrey and Kingsley in 1965, releasing The In Sound From Way Out! and Kaleidoscopic Vibrations on Vanguard Records and becoming early pioneers of the Moog synthesizer. He founded the First Moog Quartet, which performed at Carnegie Hall in January 1970. His composition Popcorn (1969) became widely influential. He died on 10 December 2019.

Klein is the alias of Lara Rix-Martin, a London-based producer, vocalist, and artist. Her releases — Frozen (2015), Lagata (2016), Tommy (2017), and CC (2018) — construct fractured, confrontational sound environments from fragmented vocal samples, distorted bass, orchestral elements, and a refusal of conventional sonic hierarchy. Releasing on her own label Haus of Deck, her work engages with Black British experience, technology, and affect through a distinctly unconventional approach to electronic music structure. She has collaborated with Arca, The Hypnotist, and others, and has become an important voice in discussions of the politics of electronic music production.

Esplendor Geométrico is a Spanish industrial group formed in Madrid in 1980 by Arturo Lanz, Gabriel Riaza, and Juan Carlos Sastre, previously members of El Aviador Dro. The name comes from a text by Futurist F.T. Marinetti; the group drew on Italian Futurism alongside bands like Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire. Their debut single appeared in 1981, followed by a debut LP in 1982. By the mid-1980s they were releasing on their own label, with heavily distorted, hypnotic machine rhythms and robotic Spanish vocals that foreshadowed powernoise by over a decade. Saverio Evangelista joined in the 1990s. Despite omission from many industrial histories, they remained active through the 2020s.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology following a theoretical break with Sigmund Freud in the early twentieth century. His framework — centred on archetypes, the collective unconscious, individuation, synchronicity, and the study of dreams, myths, and religious symbols — proposed a model of the psyche as a living process mediated by symbolic and imaginal processes that exceed rational understanding. Concepts including the shadow, the anima and animus, the persona, and the self have entered wide cultural circulation, influencing not only clinical psychology but art, literature, film, and cultural theory broadly.

Born in Douala, Cameroon, on 15 July 1929, Francis Bebey was a guitarist, composer, novelist, and ethnomusicologist who merged Cameroonian makossa with classical guitar, jazz, and early electronic music. Influenced by Andrés Segovia during his studies at the Sorbonne, he spent years documenting traditional African music for UNESCO before founding his own record label, Ozileka, in the 1970s — running a home studio at a time when such facilities were rare. His debut novel Agatha Moudio's Son (1967) won the Grand Prix Littéraire de l'Afrique Noire. He died in Paris on 28 May 2001, leaving a legacy that predates and rivals later celebrated electronic pioneers.

Pierre Bastien (born 1953) is a French musician and constructor of mechanical orchestras. Using Meccano sets and clockwork mechanisms to animate acoustic instruments — trumpets, violins, marimbas, small percussion — he builds machines that perform his compositions autonomously, producing a music that is simultaneously childlike in construction and formally rigorous. His collaborations with Jah Wobble (Mecanoids, 1997) and his extensive solo catalogue on Baskaru and other labels document a practice that is entirely singular: somewhere between kinetic sculpture, early mechanical music, and experimental composition. He has performed and exhibited internationally across four decades.

Jérôme Noetinger is a French musician and sound artist whose practice centers on electroacoustic improvisation using reel-to-reel tape machines, electronics, and modular synthesis. A co-founder of the label Metamkine, he has released an extensive body of recordings and has collaborated with leading European and international improvisers. His approach to tape as a live instrument — physically manipulating, rewinding, and overdubbing in real time — creates performances of dynamic unpredictability. He is a central figure in the French experimental music scene.

Add N To (X) were a London-based electronic group active from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, comprising Ann Shenton, Barry Smith, and Steve claydon. Working with vintage analogue synthesisers before their revival became fashionable, they produced a confrontational and often humorous hybrid of Krautrock, electro, and noise that positioned them within the post-punk revival alongside Fat Truckers and Adult. Albums on Mute Records including Vero Electronics (1998) and Avant Hard (1999) demonstrated both technical facility with early hardware and a provocateur's instinct for transgression. They disbanded around 2002; members have continued in other projects.

Sigur Rós are an Icelandic band formed in Reykjavík in 1994, led by vocalist and guitarist Jónsi (Jón Þór Birgisson). Their music combines orchestral post-rock, falsetto singing often in Icelandic or the invented language Vonlenska, and sustained glacial textures. Albums including Ágætis byrjun (1999), ( ) (2002), and Takk... (2005) brought them international recognition. Their sound, deeply embedded in Icelandic landscape and mythology, has been widely cited as a reference for post-rock and ambient music. Jónsi also maintains a solo practice.

Bryn Jones (1961–1999) was a British electronic musician from Salford who released music under the name Muslimgauze from 1982, initially in response to Israel's invasion of Lebanon that year. Working largely in isolation in Manchester, he produced more than ninety albums on dozens of labels, combining polyrhythmic percussion, ambient electronics, dub structures, and samples of music from the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia to address geopolitical tensions in the Muslim world. He performed live fewer than a dozen times, never visited the Middle East, and died in Manchester in January 1999 from a fungal blood infection.

Franz Hautzinger (born 1963) is an Austrian trumpeter based in Vienna, one of the most innovative brass improvisers in European experimental music. His technique involves multiphonics, breath noise, microtonality, and the use of quarter-tone valves, producing sounds far beyond conventional trumpet technique. He has released on Grob, Erstwhile, and other labels documenting his solo work and collaborations with artists including Sachiko M, Burkhard Stangl, and Martin Siewert. A central figure in the Vienna improvisation scene, his practice places him within the tradition of extended instrumental research alongside Axel Dörner and Greg Kelley.

A collaborative artistic research project by Kate Donovan, Monaí de Paula Antunes, and Niko de Paula Lefort, exploring radio as an ecological practice. Rooted in the premise that transmission extends far beyond human communication, the project attends to more-than-human radio ecologies — solar emissions, lightning, bioacoustic signals — alongside community and free radio traditions. In 2021 the trio taught a seminar at Universität Potsdam combining field experiments in bioacoustics with live broadcasts on 88.4 FM Berlin and 90.7 FM Potsdam, reaching listeners across both cities.

Diego Peralta is a sound artist and musician working in experimental and electroacoustic contexts, exploring the relationships between sound, space, and technology through performance and installation. His practice engages with electronic and acoustic instruments in ways that foreground the physical behavior of sound and the conditions of its production and reception. Active in experimental music communities, he contributes to ongoing investigations of improvised and composed sound. His work reflects sustained attention to the material dimensions of sonic experience and the politics of listening in various contexts.

Raymond Scott (1908–1994) was an American musician, bandleader, and inventor whose career ranged from commercial jazz to advanced electronic instrument design. His Quintette recordings of the late 1930s — including Powerhouse, later a byword for industrious activity in Warner Bros. cartoons — showed unusual rhythmic complexity. His parallel life as an inventor produced the Electronium, an algorithmic machine built through the 1950s and 60s that generated music automatically, years before "generative music" had a name. Motown's Berry Gordy was intrigued enough to hire Scott in the early 1970s to develop it, though its potential went unrealised commercially.

Tomasz Sikorski (1939–1988) was a Polish composer whose music stands apart from most of his contemporaries for its extreme asceticism and sustained focus on single pitches, limited intervals, and the hypnotic power of repetition. Born in Warsaw, he studied at the State Higher School of Music there and later in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. Despite working within Polish academic institutions, his music resisted both the sonic gesturalism of the Polish avant-garde and the serialist orthodoxies of the period.

Born in Karachi in 1965, she made her recording debut at fourteen with "Aap Jaisa Koi", a disco track for the Indian film Qurbani (1980) that won her the Filmfare Award for Best Female Playback Singer—the youngest and first Pakistani recipient of that honour. Her debut album Disco Deewane (1981) charted in fourteen countries and became the best-selling Asian pop record of its time. Recording alongside her brother Zoheb, she sold an estimated sixty-five million records before retiring in 1992. She died of lung cancer in London in 2000.

Born in New Orleans in 1901, he grew up in poverty and learned the cornet at the Colored Waifs Home before rising through the brass bands and riverboats of his city. Moving to Chicago in 1922 to join King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, he made his most consequential early recordings with the Hot Five and Hot Seven between 1925 and 1928, establishing himself as the first great jazz soloist. His career spanned five decades and he died at his home in New York in 1971, his influence on twentieth-century music remaining immeasurable.

Thibault Walter is a Lausanne-based artist, researcher, and cultural programmer. He teaches and researches at ECAL/École cantonale d'art de Lausanne – HES-SO and holds a doctoral thesis (2012) in sciences of religions from the University of Lausanne, examining how communities construct meaning through listening. His artistic practice works with sound as material — field recording, sonic installation, and performance that treats sounds as living entities rather than fixed objects. Since 2002 he has co-founded and programmed the Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival (LUFF), deliberately crossing audiences from punk, experimental, and contemporary music.

Seefeel are a British band formed in London in 1992, initially comprising Mark Clifford, Sarah Peacock, Justin Fletcher, and Daren Seymour. Their music layered processed guitar loops, minimal rhythms, and treated vocals into a sound that occupied the border between shoegaze, ambient techno, and electronic experimentation. Their debut Quique (1994) on Too Pure and subsequent releases on Warp brought them critical recognition. They anticipated drone and post-rock directions while remaining closely tied to dance music infrastructure. After a long hiatus, they reformed in 2008 and released Seefeel (2011).

Dandy Jack (Marco Repetto) is a Swiss electronic musician and producer who co-founded the Basic Channel-associated label M=Minimal in Berlin. Working in minimal techno and dub techno, he developed a sound closely aligned with the Chain Reaction and M=Minimal school — deep, spacious, bass-heavy techno with heavy dub influence. Releases on M=Minimal and other associated labels document a practice dedicated to the particular aesthetic of Berlin's minimal and dub-influenced techno underground in the late 1990s and 2000s.

Akihiro Kubota is a Japanese media artist, musician, and educator based in Tokyo. He works with computer-generated sound, video, and interactive installation, exploring the relationships between code, perception, and aesthetic experience. His practice is grounded in a technical understanding of programming and signal processing, which he applies to the production of immersive audiovisual environments.

Kubota is a professor at Tama Art University and has been a central figure in Japan's media art and experimental music communities for several decades.

Buenos Aires-born DJ, producer, and curator who studied Electronic Arts at the Technological Institute ORT before founding the label Jupiter4 Records in 2018. Based in Berlin, he co-curates the Meta Rave party, connecting Latin American artists with European audiences, and holds a residency at the inclusive party METARAVE. His sets blend early New Wave, mutant techno, and surrealist droning, drawing on a wide collection of rare records across genres. He has performed at Tresor, Oxi Club, and other European venues, with Jupiter4 releases selling thousands of copies globally and contributing to a growing visibility for South American experimental club culture.

Hermeto Pascoal (born 1936) is a Brazilian multi-instrumentalist, composer, and bandleader from Lagoa da Canoa, Alagoas. Born albino and nearly blind, he developed extraordinary musicianship across piano, flute, saxophone, guitar, and numerous other instruments, and is known for his ability to extract music from almost any object — teapots, animals, natural sounds. His recordings, particularly Slaves Mass (1977) recorded with Miles Davis's rhythm section, demonstrate a synthesis of Brazilian regional music, jazz, and free improvisation that remains idiosyncratic and unclassifiable. He has produced an enormous body of work across more than five decades.

Alejo Duque is a Colombian artist and amateur radio operator based in Bogotá whose practice spans analog photography, sound art, network-based art, and participatory projects at the intersection of new, old, and unstable media. He holds the amateur radio call sign HK4ADJ.

Duque is a founding member of several collaborative networks and initiatives, including Bricolabs, dorkbot Bogotá, labSurlab, un\loquer, and Pnode. These networks have been central to developing DIY electronics culture, open hardware practice, and experimental media communities across Latin America. He is currently active with Radiolibre and Coomunarte.

One of the European pioneers of circuit-bending, Andy Bolus has performed and released work as Evil Moisture since the early 1990s. His practice involves modifying toys and electronic detritus found in flea markets and trash — rewiring circuits to produce uncontrollable and unprecedented sounds — alongside home-built tape loop delays and reel-to-reel collage. He has released dozens of cassettes, vinyl LPs, and CDs on numerous noise labels, and has performed hundreds of times across Europe and Japan. Working across noise, musique concrète, comics, and visual art, his approach is consistently shaped by collage, cut-up, and a refusal of conventional instrument use.

Blod is the solo project of Gustaf Dicksson (born c. 1986), a Gothenburg musician central to the Swedish DIY underground. Active since 2014, the project spans melodic and melancholic instrumental compositions for piano, guitar, and saxophone alongside harsh noise minimalism and found-sound recordings — all home-recorded with minimal overdubs and a direct-to-tape approach. Key releases include Missväxt (Aguirre Records, 2021) and a prolific run of cassettes and LPs on Discreet Music, Förlag För Fri Musik, and Segerhuva. Dicksson also plays in Enhet För Fri Musik and co-runs the Omlott and Höga Nord Rekords labels.

Based in Barcelona, Anna Ramos is a sound artist, curator, and cultural organiser. Since 1997 she has co-run ALKU, a multidisciplinary platform focused on sound and contemporary artistic practice, alongside Roc Jiménez de Cisneros. She manages Radio Web MACBA, the online radio project of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona, which she has directed since its founding in 2006. From 2017 to 2022 she co-curated the Lorem Ipsum programme at MACBA with Alicia Escobio. In 2024 she oversees Scala, a sound art initiative at Tabakalera in San Sebastián. Her practice spans projects, installations, musical programmes, and events engaging with sound and contemporary thought.

Kleenex, later renamed LiLiPUT, was a Swiss post-punk group formed in Zürich in 1978 whose recordings were foundational for female-fronted punk and post-punk internationally. Consisting entirely of women — Marlene Marder, Klaudia Schifferle, Lislot Ha, Regula Sing, and Chrigle Frefel at various points — they developed a jagged, unpredictable approach to punk rock that incorporated elements of free jazz, reggae, and noise, and a vocal style that ranged from deadpan speech to uncontrolled expressiveness. Forced to change their name to LiLiPUT following a legal dispute with the Kimberly-Clark corporation, they continued to develop their practice across a series of records on Rough Trade.

Atsushi Maeda is a Japanese DJ, curator and founder of the rural open-air festival and addictedloop party series. His DJ sets aim to astonish the dancefloor, blending hypnotic techno with immersive experiences drawn from the Japanese underground. Through rural he has introduced many international artists to Japanese audiences while maintaining a distinct sonic identity rooted in countryside gatherings and club culture. Born in Wakayama and active since discovering electronic music in the early 2000s, he emphasizes community, landscape and the transformative power of sound in non-urban settings, creating events that feel both intimate and expansive.

Originally from Singapore, Tara Transitory is an artist and performer whose practice weaves noise, electronics, and ritual into a sustained critique of gender norms and capitalist culture. A graduate of the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, she performs also under the name One Man Nation and has appeared at CTM Berlin, donaufestival Krems, the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, and Wiener Festwochen. Her project International Gender Noise Underground documents the lives of trans women across Asia and Europe, using noise performance and recorded sound as political and communal tools. She also co-founded Translæctica, a trans/queer music series originating in Granada.

Cromagnon was an American duo active during the late 1960s, led by multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriters Austin Grasmere and Brian Elliot. Their sole album, released as Orgasm in 1969 and later reissued as Cave Rock, stands as one of the most extraordinary and prescient documents of the psychedelic era — a record that sounds like nothing else from its time and that prefigures noise rock, industrial, and primitivist music by decades.

The record combines bagpipes, pounding percussion, blood-curdling yelps, chanting, laughing, and billowing subterranean rumblings into a soundscape of genuinely uncanny power.

Arturo Meza is a Mexican musician, composer, and cultural worker whose practice engages with experimental, avant-garde, and indigenous-influenced musical traditions. Working across composition, performance, and cultural activism, he has contributed to the development of experimental music in Mexico with a particular attention to the sonic and cultural resources of indigenous Mexican musical heritage.

Meza's musical practice draws on pre-Columbian instruments, indigenous performance traditions, and the meeting of those traditions with experimental and electroacoustic approaches.

Valentine Goncharova (b. 1953, Kyiv) is a Ukrainian violinist who began music education at the age of three under the instruction of her grandmother. Six years later she took up the violin, an instrument that has remained central to her practice ever since. She studied at the Leningrad special musical school from 1969 to 1971, then at the Leningrad Conservatory under Professor M.I. Vajman from 1971 to 1976, followed by postgraduate study under professor B.L. Gutnikov from 1980 to 1983.

She has had a distinguished career as a concert soloist, serving as soloist of various Philharmonic societies — in Ulan-Ude from 1976 to 1977, in Tver from 1978 to 1983, and in Tallinn from 1985 to 1991.

Mexican composer and sound artist. Alejandra Hernández studied percussion in Mexico and at Berklee College of Music in Boston on a Fulbright-García Robles scholarship. She focuses on electroacoustic music and interdisciplinary work, combining technology with contemporary instrumental techniques. Her portfolio spans eighteen electroacoustic pieces, multimedia works, and collaborative projects. She has released work on the Col legno label, including the 2014 album Móvil, and holds recognition from Mexico's National System of Art Creators with FONCA grants in 2005 and 2012. She has been a member of Spain's Association of Electroacoustic Music and Sound Art (AMEE) since 2011.

Billie Eilish (b. 2001, Los Angeles) is an American singer and songwriter who emerged as one of the most commercially successful and culturally influential artists of her generation. Her debut single Ocean Eyes (2015), released when she was thirteen, attracted attention online, and her debut EP don't smile at me (2017) built a substantial audience.

Her debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? (2019) was released to enormous commercial and critical success, winning five Grammy Awards including Album of the Year and making Eilish the youngest person to win it.

Kensho Nakamura is a Japanese musician and producer who began in hip-hop before moving toward experimental territory. His practice spans sound collage, glitch, and acoustic instrument manipulation, resulting in fragmented musical dioramas that resist easy categorisation. He released Llamhigyn Y Dwr on the Italian label Pampsychia in 2021, building soft, imagery-rich textures inspired by the Welsh mythological creature. Working in construction, Nakamura developed a fascination with rust and industrial decay, which fed into Electric Rust on the mappa label in 2022, a conceptual electronic work exploring time, accumulation, and the quiet transformation of materials.

Born in Tel Aviv in 1976, Ilan Volkov is an Israeli conductor whose career has centred on fearless programming across the orchestral and experimental spectrum. He served as Principal Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra from 2003, later becoming Creative Partner. In 2012 he launched the Tectonics festival, one of the most eclectic celebrations of new music in the world, presenting composers from electroacoustic, noise, and cross-disciplinary fields alongside standard repertoire. He has championed overlooked figures including George Lewis and Claude Vivier, and continues to collaborate with avant-garde musicians internationally.

Camilo (Hunter Texas) is a multidisciplinary artist and musician working in electronic sound, performance, and visual art. His practice brings together experimental electronics with performance-based approaches, creating situations that challenge conventional listening and spectatorship. Active in underground and experimental scenes, he contributes to the interdisciplinary culture of contemporary sound art practice. His work investigates what happens at the intersection of bodily presence, electronic sound, and audience co-presence, treating the performance event as a space of collective and individual transformation.

The Bran Flakes are an American audio collage duo comprising Otis Fodder and Ergo Phizmiz, later joined by others, based in San Francisco. Working with found recordings — vintage radio broadcasts, children's records, instructional albums, library music — they construct warmly comic and surrealist collages that operate in the tradition of plunderphonics. Albums including I'll Eat You Last (2003) and My Beautiful Nightmare (2005) demonstrate a genuine affection for the source materials even as they are radically recontextualised. Their work occupies a gentle corner of the sample-based experimental tradition, combining Dadaist disruption with a playful sensibility.

Born into a family of musicians in Bulgaria, she began playing violin at the age of four and made her orchestra debut at nine. Now based in Berlin, she works as a violinist, composer, and improviser with extended technique, spanning classical training and radical experimentation. She performs with Ensemble Modern, Zeitkratzer, the Splitter and Trickster Orchestras, and the duo Voutchkova/Thieke, and works internationally as a soloist and collaborator in interdisciplinary formats. She is the founder and curator of the DARA String Festival and was a SHAPE+ Platform artist for 2022-2023.

Born in 1956 in Essen, she studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Fritz Schwegler and has lived and worked in Düsseldorf since. Her sculptures and installations reinvest familiar objects—rats, madonnas, elephants, colour fields—with an uncanny, dreamlike force drawn from Christianity, art history, and folklore. She represented Germany at the 1995 Venice Biennale and has had major solo exhibitions at Tate London in 2001 and the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012. Her work has featured in Documenta, Carnegie International, and Skulptur Projekte Münster, and she is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery and White Cube.

Aerospace Soundwise is the project of Guy Youngman, an Israeli DJ and producer from Nahariya who has been active since 1998. In 2005 he developed the Aerospace alias as a vehicle for progressive trance production, releasing tracks across numerous compilations and several studio albums in the genre. Youngman is co-owner of Digital Nature Records, through which much of the project's output has been distributed. The music occupies a broad progressive trance spectrum, balancing melodic development with driving rhythmic structures. Aerospace Soundwise has maintained a steady presence on specialist electronic music platforms and in the global trance production community.

Mauri Antero Numminen (born 1940) is a Finnish singer, songwriter, author, and avant-gardist whose career is characterised by irreverence, linguistic invention, and a deep engagement with Finnish popular song alongside its systematic dismantling. He is best known internationally for his settings of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as sung tango — an absurdist collision of Austrian philosophy and Finnish dance music that nonetheless generates unexpected emotional truth. He has released dozens of records spanning comic song, experimental music, and social commentary, occupying a unique space between cabaret, conceptual art, and popular song.

John Zorn (born 1953) is a New York-based composer, saxophonist, and producer whose work spans free jazz, hardcore, klezmer, noise, film music, chamber composition, and occult ritual sound. A central figure in the downtown New York avant-garde since the late 1970s, he developed game-piece systems for improvising musicians and founded Naked City, Masada, and numerous other ensembles. He founded the Tzadik label in 1995 for his own recordings and those of musicians in marginal or underdocumented fields. His output is enormous and deliberately eclectic, treating genre as material, and his influence on experimental and jazz practice is pervasive.

Born in Fribourg, Switzerland in 1925, he trained at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule Basel before moving to Paris in 1952, where he joined the Nouveau Réalisme movement alongside Yves Klein and Niki de Saint Phalle, whom he later married. He became known for elaborate motorised sculptures he called Méta-matics, machines that drew, painted, and destroyed themselves. His most famous work, Homage to New York (1960), a twenty-seven-foot self-destructing construction built in the garden of MoMA, caught fire prematurely and was extinguished by the New York Fire Department after twenty-seven minutes. He died in Bern in 1991.

Posuposu Otani is a Japanese musician whose practice centres on open-tuned acoustic guitar and the kohkin, a Japanese variant of the jaw harp. His self-titled debut album (2025) presents a collection of delicate, intimate pieces in which the two instruments engage in close dialogue, exploring the resonance of natural harmonics, drone, and folk melody. Songs including Finding Fungus (キノコの唄) and About Freedom reflect an attentiveness to the organic world and a minimalist compositional approach. The album was released on vinyl and received attention through independent record store channels in the UK and Europe.

Underworld is the British electronic music group formed by Karl Hyde and Rick Smith, active in their most influential configuration since the early 1990s. Their albums Dubnobasswithmyheadman (1993), Second Toughest in the Infants (1996), and Beaucoup Fish (1999) are landmarks in techno and electronic pop, fusing driving rhythms with Hyde's stream-of-consciousness lyrics. Their contribution to Danny Boyle's film Trainspotting (1996), including Born Slippy .NUXX, brought their music to a global audience. Smith's production treats the studio as an instrument, building tracks from long improvised takes and layered loops, keeping the music feeling immediate across decades of acclaimed records.

Irish-born conceptual artist and painter born in Dublin in 1941 who studied at Yale University alongside Brice Marden, Richard Serra, and Jennifer Bartlett before settling in Britain in 1966. His 1973 work An Oak Tree — a glass of water on a shelf declared by an accompanying text to be an oak tree — became a landmark of British conceptualism, testing language, belief, and institutional authority in determining what an artwork is. He taught at Goldsmiths from the 1970s, mentoring artists including Damien Hirst and Gary Hume. An emeritus professor at Goldsmiths, he was appointed CBE in 2001 and knighted in 2016.

Arsenije Jovanovic (1932–2010) was a Serbian experimental filmmaker and sound artist associated with the underground avant-garde culture of socialist Yugoslavia. Working from Belgrade, he occupied a marginal and often embattled position within Yugoslav cultural life, producing work that combined film, sound, and performance in ways that challenged official cultural norms and the dominant aesthetic tendencies of the period.

His films and sound works drew on Surrealism, Dada, and the broader international avant-garde tradition, applying those influences within the specific social and political context of socialist-era Yugoslavia.

Born on 5 April 1991 in the Berlin district of Neukölln, he began playing techno and house music at 17 and became a regular at Berghain the following year. His debut EP appeared on Ostgut Ton in 2013, and he became a Berghain resident DJ in 2015, the same year his debut album We Grow, You Decline received critical attention for its fast, industrial-inflected sound. He founded R Label Group in 2013 as an outlet for high-energy techno, releasing records by Rikhter, Parallx, and others; the label ran until 2023. In 2021 he launched the fashion line 44 Label Group, named after Neukölln's old postal code.

Born in Warsaw, she is a multidisciplinary artist and live performer based in Berlin who investigates the physical properties of electrical signals across sound, image, and light. Her audio-visual performances and interactive installations grow from an obsession with electricity and organic sound, manipulating waveforms to probe their aesthetic and educational potential. She runs MonoShop, an independent hackspace and workshop. Her work has been presented at Electrovision London, Unsound in Kraków, and Piksel in Bergen, placing her practice firmly within international communities of DIY electronics, noise performance, and feminist technology art.

Moondog (Louis Thomas Hardin, 1916–1999) was a blind American composer and street musician who lived on the streets of Manhattan for over two decades, dressed in Viking costume of his own construction. He produced a body of work of extraordinary originality — compositions in his own rhythmic system called snaketime (based on two-against-three patterns), orchestral pieces, and short instrumental works combining medieval counterpoint, Native American rhythm, and modernist dissonance. He moved to Germany in 1974, embraced by the European classical establishment. His CBS Columbia albums of the late 1960s and early 1970s remain landmarks of American outsider composition.

Jean Paul Dessy (born 1963) is a Belgian cellist, composer, and conductor. Founder and artistic director of the contemporary music ensemble Musiques Nouvelles in Brussels, he has been a central figure in Belgian new music as both performer and organiser since the 1980s. As a cellist his technique extends into prepared and electronic performance; as a composer he has written for orchestra, chamber ensemble, and electroacoustic forces. His programming and curatorial work at Musiques Nouvelles has consistently championed living composers from Belgium and internationally, making the ensemble one of Europe's more adventurous new music institutions.

Siouxsie Sioux (born Susan Janet Ballion in 1957, Chislehurst, Kent) is a British singer and founding member of Siouxsie and the Banshees, one of the most significant and influential bands in post-punk and goth music. Formed in 1976, the Banshees released a string of increasingly accomplished albums — from the debut The Scream (1978) through Kaleidoscope (1980), Juju (1981), and Tinderbox (1986) — that combined punk's energy with gothic imagery, complex rhythms, and a consistently innovative approach to rock production.

Cristina Maldonado is a Mexican intermedia artist based in Prague who works in the fields of immersive art, participatory and relational art, video-performance, performative writing, and site-specific performance. She works with devised theater and dialogical methodologies, and she researches how art can contribute to the creation of knowledge in community-based and institutional contexts.

Maldonado is an Associate Artist of IN SITU, the European platform for artistic creation in public space, within the project (UN)COMMON SPACES co-funded by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union.

Hermann Nitsch (1938–2022) was an Austrian artist and composer who developed the Orgien Mysterien Theater, a vast ritual performance conceived as a total artwork combining painting, music, theatre, and Dionysian ceremony. Emerging from Viennese Actionism alongside Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, he developed large-scale outdoor events — Aktionen — at his castle in Prinzendorf, Austria, lasting for days and involving the slaughter of animals, rivers of blood, and hundreds of participants. His work drew on Catholic liturgy, Freudian theory, and Nietzschean philosophy, proposing that ritual confrontation with death and primal experience was a path to catharsis.

Mike IX Williams is the vocalist of Eyehategod, the New Orleans sludge metal band he co-founded in the 1980s, whose records are foundational for the genre internationally. Eyehategod's sound — fusing the slowness of doom metal with hardcore punk abrasion — developed an approach hugely influential on extreme metal, and Williams' vocals bring a raw, exhausted urgency rooted in blues and punk traditions of the American South. His writing extends his practice into literary engagement with addiction and ruin. His near-fatal liver failure in 2016, and the transplant made possible by fan fundraising, became part of the band's mythology — survival sitting alongside the harrowing imagery of its art.

Norbert Möslang is a Swiss sound artist born in 1952, based in St. Gallen. Together with Andy Guhl he formed the duo Voice Crack in 1972, pioneering what they called "cracked everyday electronics" — the musical use of manipulated consumer appliances such as radios, telephones, children's toys, lamps and calculators, disassembled and rewired into performance instruments capable of producing unpredictable and unruly sound.

Voice Crack performed and recorded extensively for over three decades, collaborating with Borbetomagus, Otomo Yoshihide, Günter Müller, John Butcher, Evan Parker and many others, releasing primarily on For 4 Ears and related labels.

Hildegard Westerkamp (b. 1946) is a German-Canadian composer and acoustic ecologist whose work engages with the sonic dimensions of environment, place, and ecological relationship. A central figure in the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University, the research initiative founded by R. Murray Schafer that developed the concept of acoustic ecology and soundscape composition, she uses recorded environmental sound as both material and ethical subject. Her compositions, including Beneath the Forest Floor (1992) and Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989), move between documentary precision and poetic transformation, making audible the hidden details of the places they record.

Richard Youngs (born 1966) is a Scottish musician based in Glasgow, among the most prolific figures in British underground music. Working primarily with acoustic and electric guitar, voice, and occasionally electronics, he has released hundreds of recordings across tapes, records, and CD-Rs since the late 1980s, on labels including Jagjaguwar, Twisted Village, and his own Streamline. His practice ranges from drone and minimalist repetition to folk song and improvisation, maintaining a consistency of purpose despite enormous formal diversity. He collaborates frequently with Simon Wickham-Smith, Jandek, and others, and is regarded as a foundational figure in British folk-noise underground.

Nico Dockx is a Belgian artist working with drawing, publication, and performance. His practice develops an extended investigation of the book, the archive, and the document as artistic forms, creating artist books, drawings, and performances that engage with questions of memory, authorship, and cultural transmission. He is also a founding member of the collective Endless Editions and has contributed to the development of artists' publishing in Belgium and internationally. His work participates in a tradition that treats the printed page as a primary artistic medium.

The solo project of Danish artist Søren Fauli, born in 1963, Daily Fauli produced a single album, Fauli Til Dauli, recorded over one week in 1982 using stolen synthesizers with no prior formal musical training. Released in 1983 on Gry Records in an edition of 500 transparent green vinyl LPs, it became a cult artifact of the Scandinavian minimal synth underground. Fauli also released the cassette Jugend Unsinn that same year. He subsequently trained as a filmmaker at the National Film School of Denmark, going on to direct drama, documentary, and comedy works as a writer, actor, and director.

Vaiva Grainytė is a Lithuanian playwright, librettist, and artist whose work moves between theater, opera, and performance art with an interest in social and political themes rendered through absurdist and poetic strategies. She co-created Have a Good Day!, an opera about supermarket cashiers, which received international recognition for its combination of documentary and lyrical approaches. Her collaborations with composer Lina Lapelytė and director Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, including Sun and Sea (Marina), won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2019. Grainytė's work inhabits the space between the everyday and the theatrical, drawing on the hidden drama of ordinary labor and routine.

Born in Marseille in 1964, this French sound artist has been based in Tokyo since the late 1980s, where he is a professor at Musashino Art University. Trained in Japanese media arts at Tsukuba University and at Paris INALCO, his work uses found sounds and computer processes to create compositions without hierarchical structure. He has released music on Mille Plateaux and Ritornell and created permanent sound installations at Osaka Housing Center since 1999 and at Narita International Airport since 2000. His collaborators have included Henning Christiansen and Markus Popp.

A graduate of Oberlin College and Conservatory, where he studied electronic music and Chinese, he apprenticed with synthesizer pioneer Don Buchla in 2001. He founded Ciat-Lonbarde, a Baltimore-based instrument-building concern whose devices — wooden-cased, circuit-exposed, and assembled in small runs — embody an organic and tactile approach to analog synthesis. Instruments such as the Sidrassi organ invite direct physical intervention on exposed circuitry. He makes schematics openly available as part of a commitment to transparency about how sound is generated. He completed a Masters in Arts at Wesleyan University in 2015 under Ron Kuivila.

Born in Paris in 1929, he studied piano and composition with Alfred Cortot and Arthur Honegger before encountering Edgar Varèse, whose live broadcast of Déserts prompted him to cross the Atlantic and seek the composer out in New York. A founding member of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales at ORTF, he developed what he called anecdotal music — portable-recorder field recordings woven into quasi-narrative structures — culminating in the landmark 1970 piece Presque rien No. 1. He died in 2005, leaving a body of work that defined the documentary possibilities of electroacoustic composition.

The Residents are an American avant-garde music and multimedia group who have maintained strict anonymity since forming in San Francisco in the early 1970s. Members wear eyeball masks and top hats in public, and their identities have never been officially confirmed. The group founded their own label, Ralph Records, in 1972, through which they released a prolific catalogue of albums, films, and multimedia projects.

Their music draws from rock, classical, electronic, and global traditions, subjected to radical deconstruction.

Dariusz Mazurowski is a Polish sound artist whose practice centers on electroacoustic installation and the investigation of acoustic phenomena in architectural spaces. Working with sine tones, resonance, and the physical behavior of sound in specific environments, he creates installations that make audible the acoustic properties of the spaces they inhabit. His work has been presented at festivals and venues across Poland and internationally, contributing to the tradition of site-specific sound installation that draws on scientific investigation of acoustic physics as its material and method.

Born Parl Kristian Bjørn Vester in 1974, this Danish-Faroese experimental musician, performance artist, composer, and fully qualified horologist holds an unusual position between radical computer music theory and anti-institutional gesture. In 2004 he was appointed professor of History and Aesthetics of Electronic Music at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Aarhus, a post he left in 2008. He has lectured at over 150 universities and in 2002 created a brick-based compositional language. His Kommunal Klon Komputer 2 was acquired by the National Gallery of Denmark in 2014. Since 2016 he performs as part of the protest group GP&PLS.

Perc is the alias of Ali Wells, a British electronic musician and label founder based in London. His music operates within techno but pursues extremity — distorted kicks, harsh noise, and abrasive textures placed within functional dance structures. He founded the Perc Trax label to release his own work and that of like-minded artists, and has released albums including The Power and the Glory (2014) and Bitter Music (2018). He is an important figure in the intersection of techno and industrial music in Britain, drawing on the legacy of UK rave and the aesthetics of post-industrial sound.

Formed in Seattle in December 2005, this noise collective built around core members Stan Reed and wm. Rage produces a confrontational blend of power electronics, drone, and heavy electronics built from oscillators, guitar, bass, tapes, horns, and percussion. The group has maintained a prolific cassette output since 2006, collaborating with acts including The New Blockaders and irr. app. (ext.) on releases through Phage Tapes. Their releases include For The Sickly Weaklings (2007) and Catacombs, and their lineup shifts frequently to include additional contributors.

Prince Jammys (Lloyd James, born 1947) is a Jamaican record producer and engineer who learned his craft working for King Tubby in the 1970s. After establishing his own studio and label, he became one of the defining producers of dancehall reggae in the 1980s — his productions for artists including Tenor Saw, Half Pint, and Yellowman were central to the transition from roots reggae to digital dancehall, culminating in the revolutionary Under Mi Sleng Teng (1985) by Wayne Smith, the first fully digital reggae recording. His Kamila label and studio output represent a massive contribution to Jamaican popular music.

Born in 1994 in Timișoara, Romania, Ioana Vreme Moser is a sound artist based in Berlin whose practice centres on raw hardware electronics, speculative research, and tactile material experimentation. Trained in visual art at the University of Timișoara, she discovered electroacoustics through clandestine courses at the Kraków Academy of Music during an Erasmus exchange. Her body-interfaced electronic processes treat found circuits, organic matter, and environmental stimuli as compositional elements. She has presented work at Ars Electronica, ZKM Karlsruhe, CTM Festival, Rewire Festival, and Manifesta 14, among many other venues across Europe, North America, and Asia.

Lorenzo Senni (born 1983) is an Italian electronic musician and artist based in Milan, known for developing what he calls "pointillistic trance" — a practice that strips trance music to its structural essence, retaining only the build, the anticipatory tension, and the avoided drop. This systematic deconstruction of a mass-market form into a conceptual tool has been developed through releases on Warp Records including Superimpositions (2016) and Scacco Matto (2019). He has also curated the Presto?! label, championing Italian experimental electronic music. His work occupies a productive space between irony and genuine engagement with the emotional mechanics of euphoric dance music.

Founded in Oulu, Finland in 1987 by conductor Petri Sirviö, this ensemble performs texts by shouting rather than singing, delivering national anthems, political speeches, everyday documents, and abstract material with strict choral discipline and deadpan staging. Originally comprising seventeen members, the choir has expanded to between twenty and forty formally dressed singers who enter venues with military precision. They performed at the Eurovision fiftieth anniversary concert in Copenhagen in 2005. Over the years more than 170 men have participated as members, and the group has performed internationally across both art and music festival contexts.

Born Yeaeun Jang in South Korea, she is an experimental musician, DIY instrument builder, and multidisciplinary artist based between Prague and Seoul. She moved to Prague in 2016 and later completed a master's programme at UMPRUM, where an experimental music course reshaped her practice. Her work draws on Buddhist chanting, throat singing, yogic breathwork, and Korean forms including Pansori and Shamanic ritual. In 2019 she formed the shamanic trio GÜLD as the first project of her ongoing doctoral research Contemporary Art of Healing, and in 2020 launched her solo project Purplears. She has since toured extensively across Europe, Central Asia, and North Africa.

Born in New York in 1982, Tristan Perich studied at Columbia University and NYU Tisch and centres his practice on one-bit electronic sound: music generated from the simplest possible digital signal. His 2004 release 1-Bit Music was the first album issued as a programmed microchip. 1-Bit Symphony (2010), housed in a standard CD jewel case containing a live circuit, extended the concept into five movements. He received the Prix Ars Electronica in 2009 for Active Field, scored for ten violins and ten-channel 1-bit music. His Interval Studies series places speaker arrays in space to generate immersive tonal fields, and he performs circuit electronics as part of the group Loud Objects.

Satanicpornocultshop is a noise and power electronics project working in the tradition of Japanese and European extreme noise. Combining harsh electronic processing, distortion, and confrontational sound design, the project occupies a space at the extreme end of the noise spectrum. Releasing on independent labels and cassette imprints, it engages with the formal and political provocations of the noise underground — extreme volume, anti-aesthetic presentation, and a commitment to sonic extremity as its own end.

Andrea Penso (born 1985, Italy) is a sound artist and composer working in field recording, tape and vinyl loops, and electroacoustic composition. He records site-specifically across Italian landscapes — the Apennines, the southern coast, the northwestern Alps — building layered, contemplative works of spatial density. He releases under his own name and as Selaxon Lutberg on Denovali Records, and runs Invisibilia Editions. He is part of the Canti Magnetici collective, researching anomalous sounds in southern Italy. Albums include La Colonna Infinita (2018), Ad Invisibilia (2023), and Oh! Uomo (2024); his cassette Folk Tapes was made in collaboration with Maria Valentina Chirico.

Lali Puna is a Munich-based electronic pop group comprising Valeria Valeriano, Christian Heiß, Marco Messina, and Markus Acher (also of The Notwist). Releasing on Morr Music in the early 2000s, their albums Tridecoder (2000) and Faking the Books (2004) developed an intimate, bedroom-scale electronic pop sound built on programmed drums, delicate guitar, synth, and Valeriano's small, precise vocals. The Morr Music aesthetic — glitchy digital production applied to song structures of unusual quietness — was emblematic of a broader European indie-electronic movement, and Lali Puna were among its more thoughtful exponents.

The Cure is an English post-punk and gothic rock band formed in Crawley in 1976, built around the songwriting of Robert Smith. From the stark minimalism of Seventeen Seconds (1980) and Faith (1981) through the nightmarish density of Pornography (1982) to the more accessible melancholia of Disintegration (1989), Smith mapped an interior landscape of grief, anxiety, and romantic obsession that defined gothic and alternative rock aesthetics for decades. Their influence on post-punk, dream pop, and independent music is extensive, and they have sustained an evolving presence across more than four decades of recording and performance.

Born in Le Havre in 1901 into a wine-merchant family, he studied briefly at the Académie Julian in Paris before abandoning formal training and spending years running a wine business. He did not commit fully to art until 1942, at age forty-one. In 1945 he coined the term Art Brut to describe work made outside cultural convention—by children, the self-taught, and psychiatric patients—and built a major collection of it. His own paintings used tar, gravel, sand, and ash bound into rough impasto surfaces. His Hourloupe series, spanning 1962 to 1974, extended this anti-aesthetic into monumental sculpture. He died in Paris in 1985.

Quebec-based artist Félix-Antoine Morin studied visual arts at UQAM and electroacoustic composition at the Conservatory of Montreal, and is a founding member of the Kohlenstoff Records label. His practice encompasses electroacoustic music, immersive installation, video art, and graphic scores, guided by an aesthetic principle he describes as poetic execution — transfiguring reality through multiple stages of writing, transformation, and abstraction. In 2008 he won a JTTP award, and in 2012 received the Joseph S. Stauffer Award from the Canada Council for the Arts. His work is informed by the processual logic of traditional and sacred music.

Geir Jenssen (born 1962, Tromsø) is a Norwegian electronic musician recording as Biosphere — one of the defining voices in ambient music. After an early period in the synth trio Bel Canto, he turned to solo work inspired by Arctic landscapes, mountaineering, and science fiction. His 1997 album Substrata remains a landmark of the genre. He has recorded field recordings from Tibet for his Cho Oyu release, climbed the 8,201-metre peak without oxygen in 2001, and collaborated with Pete Namlook and Higher Intelligence Agency. He releases primarily on his own Biophon Records and on Touch.

New York punk group whose lineup draws from the city's noise and underground rock communities, featuring guitarist Hank Wood, bassist and experimental noise artist Margaret Chardiet—widely known as Pharmakon—and drummer Tye Miller of LOTION and Mommy. Rooted in the lo-fi punk tradition and shaped by Chardiet's confrontational noise practice, the group's sound operates in a zone of abrasive, stripped-down intensity. Their formation connects several strands of New York underground culture, from hardcore and noise-punk to the power electronics and experimental scenes in which Chardiet and her collaborators have been influential figures.

Swiss reedist and cultural organiser working with soprano and bass saxophones and alto clarinet within the European free improvisation tradition. His 1999 FMP album 8 Pieces for Single Listeners pairs a solo recital with duets alongside cellist Nicholas Bussmann, and he later contributed to the Absinth release Berlin Reeds alongside Alessandro Bosetti, Kai Fagaschinski, and Rudi Mahall. A co-founder of the Berlin venue ausland and of the Splitter Orchester in 2010, he has directed numerous international projects in contemporary music and sound art, most recently becoming director of Ensemble Musikfabrik in Cologne in January 2026.

The 13th Floor Elevators were an American psychedelic rock band from Austin, Texas, active from 1965 to 1969. Led by singer Roky Erickson and theorised by jug player Tommy Hall — who provided an electric jug as a drone instrument — they developed an intense, ecstatic rock sound centred on feedback guitar and Erickson's passionate vocals, informed by Hall's belief in the transformative potential of psychedelics. The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators (1966) is often cited as the first explicitly psychedelic rock album. Erickson's later institutionalisation and Hall's philosophical extremism gave the band's story a tragic arc that deepened their mythological status.

Laura C. Boulton (1899–1980) was an American ethnomusicologist and field recordist who gathered recordings of traditional music across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas from the 1930s through the 1950s, often on expeditions organised with the Smithsonian Institution and Columbia University. Her recordings were released on Folkways Records and are held in the Smithsonian archives. Working at a time when ethnomusicological field recording was in its formative stages, she captured material of lasting documentary value. Her archive remains a significant historical resource for scholars of world music.

Zheng Hao is a Chinese sound artist and musician whose practice moves between electronic composition, improvisation, and installation. They have been active in the development of experimental music linked to China, contributing to a scene that has grown rapidly in visibility and sophistication. Working with electronics, feedback, field recordings, and acoustic instruments, Zheng Hao creates works that engage with the acoustic specificity of environments and the expressive possibilities of electronic sound, collaborating internationally and presenting work both in China and abroad.

Born in Mexico City in 1978, Amanda Gutiérrez is an interdisciplinary artist working across sound, performance, video, and installation. She immigrated to the United States in 2002 and completed an MFA in Media and Performance Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently a PhD student at Concordia University, researching aural technologies and gender studies. Her sound works include the installations Radial, Solaris, and IO. She has received the National System of Art Creators fellowship (SNCA, 2014–2017), a Brooklyn Arts Council Artist Grant (2019), and residencies at Harvestworks, ZKM, and FACT Liverpool. She is a board member of the World Listening Project.

Mario de Vega is an artist working at the intersection of sound, space, and the body. His practice privileges situations over objects, investigating how sound operates as a material force that shapes perception, bodily experience, and social relations.

Through large-scale spatial interventions, durational performances, and intimate one-to-one encounters, his work constructs conditions in which proximity, vibration, and attention become the primary media.

Since 2020, he has been Professor of Sound at Kunsthochschule Kassel.

Lina Lapelytė (b. 1984) is a Lithuanian artist and composer working at the intersection of music, performance, and visual art, whose practice uses collective singing and durational performance to examine social conventions, emotional expression, and political conditions. She represented Lithuania at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 with Sun & Sea — created with Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė and Vaiva Grainytė — a beach opera performed over nine hours daily, in which performers lying on artificial sand sang about climate change and ecological collapse, winning the Golden Lion. Her works often involve non-professional performers, using collective voice to question who is permitted to sing.

Shelley Hirsch was born and raised in East New York, Brooklyn. She is a vocal artist, performer, composer, storyteller, writer, and interdisciplinary artist who has been pushing the boundaries of vocal art for decades in her compositions, improvisations, readings, and performance work, consistently drawing on life experiences and memory as primary compositional materials.

Her practice spans free improvisation, electroacoustic composition, performance art, and narrative song, developing a distinctively personal vocabulary that is simultaneously playful, political, and emotionally direct.

John Lennon (1940–1980) and Yoko Ono (born 1933) were partners and artistic collaborators whose work together produced some of the most radical and politically charged records of the late 1960s and 1970s. Beyond the Beatles, Lennon and Ono's collaborative albums — Two Virgins (1968), Life with the Lions (1969), and Wedding Album (1969) — drew on Fluxus, noise, and free improvisation in ways that shocked conventional pop audiences. Their political work, including the Bed-Ins for Peace and the music of Some Time in New York City (1972), merged activism with artistic practice. Lennon was murdered in New York in 1980; Ono has continued her extraordinary practice as an artist and musician.

The Hafler Trio is essentially the solo project of Andrew M. McKenzie, born 1963 in Scotland, active since 1982. Conceptually framed as a trio — including fictional scientist Dr. Edward Moolenbeek and initial collaborator Chris Watson — the project spans electronic, cut-up, ambient, musique concrète, and audio montage. Collaborators over four decades include Steven Stapleton, David Tibet, Genesis P-Orridge, Z'EV, Michael Gira, Autechre, and Jónsi. Releases are characterised by dense liner notes and a sustained philosophical and theoretical framework inseparable from the music.

Madonna (b. 1958, Bay City, Michigan) is an American pop musician and performer whose career since the early 1980s has made her the most commercially successful and culturally significant female figure in global pop music. Born Madonna Louise Ciccone, she moved to New York in 1978 to pursue a dance career before pivoting to music, recording her debut album Madonna (1983) for Sire Records.

Her subsequent string of albums — including Like a Virgin (1984), True Blue (1986), Like a Prayer (1989), Erotica (1992), and Ray of Light (1998) — combined pop craftsmanship with provocative imagery and constant reinvention.

Formed in Paris in 1992 by guitarist Erik Minkkinen, bassist Lionel Fernandez, and drummer Nicolas Mazet, the trio spent the early 1990s channelling New York No Wave — DNA, Mars, Red Transistor — through a French experimental sensibility, releasing their debut ADN115 in 1994. The band was active through 1997, reconvened in 2004, and has continued to evolve, absorbing black metal and power electronics into their noise rock foundation. Repetitive bass lines, abrasive guitar textures, and confrontational live performance remain constants, positioned at the collision of savage No Wave energy, collage tape practice, and the scientistic rock of groups like This Heat.

German performance artist, singer, composer, and vocal teacher who grew up in the Harz Mountains and began yodelling in early childhood, later rediscovering it in her twenties while bartending and DJing in Berlin. She founded Jodelschule Kreuzberg and has taught yodelling and advanced vocal techniques internationally, including at the Art Academy Reykjavik, Goldsmiths University London, and the Berlin University of the Arts. Her practice merges yodelling with performance art, dub step, and country music. Collaborators include Hermann Nitsch, Column One, Myriam Van Imschoot, and Raionbashi. She held a residency at Villa Aurora in Los Angeles in 2018.

Project of William Bennett — founder and leader of the power electronics group Whitehouse — which emerged around 2008 from his immersion in Haitian vodou drumming and Central and West African ritual percussion. Its debut full-length, Afro Noise Vol. 1, appeared in 2011, submitting dense polyrhythmic percussion patterns to the processing and extremity of noise music. The project name references the Whitehouse track Cut Hands Has the Solution from the 2003 album Bird Seed. Bennett has described his path into the material through years of study with a Cuban Santeria priest who had lived with Congolese communities.

Michelle Atherton is a British artist and researcher based in Sheffield. Working across video, sound, installation, and intervention, her practice explores interspecies relations, ecological listening, and material decomposition through what she terms a remix aesthetic combining image, found sound, and technology. Key works include The Repository of Irrational Gestures (2019), the ocean video trilogy ARP: Absorbing Red Photons, and Soil Seance Sessions (2023–), which uses experimental devices to amplify the micro-sounds of soil. She is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University and has held residencies at the Banff Centre and Bethnal Green Nature Reserve.

Born in Uppsala in 1961, Hartman studied electroacoustic music at EMS in Stockholm and has since built a practice centred on found objects and field recordings gathered across decades of travel. She constructs acousmatic works and stage performances in which everyday materials — stones, mechanical toys, insects — are combined into densely layered sonic worlds that reveal hidden correspondences between disparate sounds. Her awards include the Prix Europa (1998), the Karl-Sczuka-Preis (2005), and two Phonurgia Nova prizes. She served as composer-in-residence at Swedish Radio in 2008–09 and held a Villa Aurora fellowship in Los Angeles in 2010.

Åke Hodell (1919–2000) was a Swedish poet, visual artist, and sound artist. A former combat pilot who survived several crashes and was taken prisoner of war, he channelled his experience of violence and military culture into radical concrete poetry and audio works. His Verbal Brainwash and Other Works (1965–1970), reissued by Fylkingen Records, documents his practice of sonic poetry — using tape manipulation, text, and montage to construct politically charged compositions that pre-figure both sound poetry and industrial music. He was a member of Fylkingen, the Swedish experimental music society, and remained active in the Stockholm avant-garde through the 1990s.

Dj Travella is a Tanzanian producer born Hamadi Hassani in Dar Es Salaam, responsible for some of the most exhilarating electronic music of recent years. He has injected crackling cybernetic energy into singeli — a fast-paced, polyrhythmic genre from Dar Es Salaam's street party culture — making records that represent some of the most important developments in electronic music of the last decade.

His album Mr Mixondo, released on Nyege Nyege Tapes, brought his work to international attention and established singeli as a genre with global resonance.

Zoltán Lantos (born 1962) is a Hungarian violinist and composer working at the intersection of jazz, world music, and Indian classical music. Having studied both Western classical violin and the sarangi in India with Ram Narayan, he developed an approach that integrates Indian raga structure and ornamental technique with jazz improvisation and Central European folk music. His albums on ECM and Hungarian independent labels demonstrate an unusual synthesis that has attracted recognition in both jazz and world music contexts. He is one of the few European musicians to have genuinely integrated Indian classical training into a personal and original improvisational practice.

Ferial Confine is an experimental music project working with noise, drone, and electronic composition in underground experimental contexts. Creating recordings of dense textural intensity, the project draws on traditions of harsh noise and dark ambient while maintaining a personal approach to these forms. Active in underground experimental music communities, Ferial Confine releases work through specialist imprints and contributes to the international network of artists exploring the extremes of sonic experience as vehicles for artistic expression.

Pluramon is the project of German musician and producer Jürgen Engler (also of the punk group Die Krupps). Working in electronics, drone, and textural sound, Pluramon produces atmospheric, slowly evolving recordings that have been released on Karaoke Kalk and Asphalt associated with the Berlin experimental electronic scene. Collaborations with Hanitra Wagner on vocals brought the project into a more song-oriented territory on later releases. His background in industrial and electronic rock informs the sonic weight of Pluramon's quieter but physically present ambient practice.

Born in 1973, he began playing in hardcore punk bands in Szczecin in the 1980s before moving gradually toward electroacoustic improvisation by the end of the 1990s, with no formal music education. His practice centres on analogue modular synthesizers and electric guitar, producing saturated, microtonal sound structures that sit between electroacoustic composition and sound art. With Anna Zaradny he co-founded the Musica Genera label and annual festival in Szczecin in 2002. He has collaborated with artists including Kevin Drumm, Jérôme Noetinger, and C. Spencer Yeh.

Gil Delindro is a Portuguese sound & visual artist. His site-specific research, namely on worldwide challenging landscapes, isolated communities, and extreme geological and weather patterns. Some of these include the Sahara Desert (TWOM, 2015), Rainforests of Brazil (Resiliência, 2017), Siberia, Russia (Permafrost, 2018), Vietnam ethnic villages (Blind Signal, 2019), the Rhone Glacier (La Becque, 2019), the Auvergne Volcanoes (ArtistesenResidence, 2021) and the Northumberland National Park ( Visual arts for Rural Communities, UK 2022).

Hans Haacke (b. 1936) is a German-American conceptual artist whose practice has addressed the political economy of art — the systems of power, money, and affiliation within which art circulates. From early works treating biological systems as models for social analysis, he developed institutional critique, documenting corporate ties, trustee affiliations, and real estate holdings in the formal language of informational display. His 1971 Guggenheim exhibition was cancelled after the museum's director objected to a work documenting a Manhattan slumlord's holdings — an act of censorship that cost the curator his job and became a landmark in the history of art and institutional power.

Clare Cooper is an Australian musician born in 1981 who plays pedal harp and guzheng (large Chinese zither). After relocating to Berlin in 2007, she became a founding member of several ensembles, most recently the Splitter Orchestra — a 25-piece improvising ensemble — and has established herself as a distinctive presence in Berlin's improvised music community. She has also been a guest programmer and curator at Ausland and Radialsystem V.

Aside from solo performance, Cooper's key projects include Germ Studies with pianist Chris Abrahams, LVSXY with bassist Clayton Thomas, Nevers with electronics musician Jean-Philippe Gross, and Hammeriver.

Valerio Tricoli was born in 1977 in Palermo and is based in Munich. He has been investigating the complex relationship between self, sound, and devices for more than a decade; psychic processes translated into soundscapes, and vice versa. He has a radical interest in how reality, virtuality, and memory relate to each other during acoustic events. He is one of the founders of the Bowindo label/collective, and of the band 3/4HadBeenEliminated, a super-group drawn from Italy’s improvisational community that carries on the mantle handed down by This Heat, intertwining musique concrète and free improv with rock dynamics.

Julian Oliver is a New Zealand-born critical engineer, artist, and activist who has been based in Europe since 1997, working across Australia, Sweden, Spain, Denmark, and Germany. He co-authored the Critical Engineering Manifesto and is a member of the Critical Engineering Working Group, whose practice interrogates technology as a site of political and social power. His project Newstweek, made with Daniil Vasiliev, received the Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica 2011. His work has been shown at Transmediale, Ars Electronica, the Vienna Biennale, Tate Modern, and the Japan Media Arts Festival. He co-directs Nīkau, a security consultancy for NGOs.

Born in Mexico City in 1963, Manuel Rocha Iturbide studied at the Escuela Nacional de Música and at Mills College before spending the 1990s at IRCAM in Paris, where he pursued doctoral research on granular synthesis and its connections to quantum mechanics under Jean-Claude Risset. Returning to Mexico, he became one of the leading figures in Mexican electroacoustic music and sound art, teaching and writing extensively on its history. His commissions include a 2006 work for the Arditti Quartet and a 2010 piece for pianist Aki Takahashi. He remains based in Mexico City.

Rushad Eggleston is an American cellist and musician working at the intersection of experimental music, contemporary folk, and what he calls turbo-Celtic or fearless cello music. Drawing on Celtic, classical, and experimental traditions while pushing the cello into unfamiliar territories, he creates recordings and performances of extraordinary energy and wit. He has collaborated with Crooked Still and with many other musicians in experimental and acoustic music. His approach demonstrates that the cello can be a vehicle for music of genuine exuberance and formal invention.

Krube. is the solo project of Berlin-based composer Alexander Schneider, active under this name since the late 1990s. His work has been described as a crude, crippled strain of 21st-century musique concrète, combining the raw, dirty character of noise-based tape and concrete music with a sensitivity to modern compositional technique.

Schneider's debut solo cassette, Vom Unerträglichen, appeared on Fragment Factory in 2011, following 2010's Ansätze zum Taumel on Raionbashi. Further releases include Für Nichts und wieder Nichts (2012), Vaacta on Torba (2014) and the cassette Krube. (2015). In 2016 Fragment Factory paired his music with Arv & Miljö on a split release, Arv & Miljö / Krube.

Germano Celant (1940–2020) was an Italian art historian, critic, and curator who coined the term Arte Povera in 1967, publishing the manifesto Appunti Per Una Guerriglia (Notes on a Guerrilla War) in Flash Art, which became the defining document of that artistic and political movement. His subsequent writing and curatorial work shaped international understanding of Arte Povera and established his reputation as one of the most important curators of his generation.

Celant served as senior curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York for many years, organizing major exhibitions on artists including Anselm Kiefer, Frank Stella, and many others.

Squarepusher is the alias of Tom Jenkinson, a musician and producer from Chelmsford, England, releasing on Warp Records since 1996. A virtuoso electric bassist as well as an electronic producer, Jenkinson developed a hyperkinetic approach to drum and bass and IDM that drew from jazz fusion, combining machine-speed breakbeat programming with live instrumentation and technical facility. Feed Me Weird Things (1996), Hard Normal Daddy (1997), and Music Is Rotted One Note (1998) are landmarks of the Warp catalogue. His work ranges from frenzied drill and bass to meditative solo bass performances, unified by an interest in the limits of rhythmic and technical extremity.

Wesenyeleh Mebreku is an Ethiopian musician, composer, and educator based in Addis Ababa, dedicated to the teaching and preservation of Ethiopian music. He founded the Adulis Band and recorded two solo cassettes of instrumental works in the 1980s. His 1986 recording Resonance of Time (የጊዜ ቃና) — reimagining Ethiopian folk melodies on a Casio CT-201 keyboard — was reissued on vinyl in 2026 by Incidental Music to wide acclaim, recognised as a landmark of Ethiopia's cassette-era culture: folk heritage filtered through accessible new technology.

Born in Kariya, Japan in 1933, he left Japan in 1959 and settled in New York from 1965, living in deliberate anonymity and rarely allowing himself to be photographed. From January 1966 until his death in 2014, he produced the Today series—nearly 3,000 monochromatic date paintings made in over 112 cities, each bearing only the date of its completion. His strict self-imposed rule required each canvas be finished within a single day or destroyed. The series is among the most sustained and rigorous bodies of work in conceptual art.

Based between Berlin and London, Ireen Amnes is an artist, producer, and DJ whose work moves across noise, industrial electronics, and leftfield club music. Originally a metal singer and instrumentalist, she transitioned into hardware-driven live performance and DJ sets that fuse melancholic atmospheres with distorted rhythms. In 2015 she founded Under My Feet, a collective and label dedicated to power electronics and experimental sound. Her debut LP In the Land of Silence was released in 2020 on Sonic Groove Experiments to critical acclaim. She has performed at Berghain, Tresor, Kraftwerk Berlin, Basement NY, and festivals including Atonal and CTM.

Enno Velthuys is a Dutch musician and sound artist working in drone, electroacoustic, and improvised music. His practice engages with sustained tones, resonance, and the physicality of sound in space, often combining electronic and acoustic sources into works of great patience and attention. Active in Dutch and European experimental music circles, he releases music on independent labels and collaborates with other musicians in the Netherlands' vibrant experimental music scene. His work connects to a tradition of Dutch experimental sound practice that includes figures such as Misha Mengelberg and the ICP Orchestra.

Noam Chomsky (b. 1928, Philadelphia) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, and political dissident widely considered one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His development of generative grammar — the theory that humans possess an innate language faculty producing an infinite variety of sentences from finite rules — transformed linguistics from a largely descriptive to a theoretical science and had profound implications for cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy of mind.

Raoul Hausmann (1886–1971) was an Austrian artist and writer, born in Vienna and raised primarily in Berlin, where he became one of the central figures of Berlin Dada from 1918. With Hannah Höch, he was among the inventors of photomontage; his own montages subjected consumer culture, militarism and bourgeois society to savage visual critique. His optophonetic poems — including the celebrated fmsbw (1918) — are foundational documents of sound poetry, treating typography and vocalisation as inseparable, the visual form of letters determining their sonic performance.

Born in Madrid in 1979, he is a Spanish sound artist, composer, filmmaker, theorist, and curator working between Madrid and Berlin. He studied composition at the Conservatory of San Lorenzo de El Escorial and worked as a composer and researcher at the Electronic Music Studio of the Technical University of Berlin from 2005 to 2008. Since 2008 he has hosted the weekly programme Ars Sonora on Radio Clásica, part of Spanish National Radio. He lectures at the University of Oviedo and the European University of Madrid, and his writing has been published across Europe and the Americas.

Born in Madrid in 1937, he was a Spanish composer who played a foundational role in establishing electroacoustic music in Spain. In 1964 he co-founded ALEA, the country's first electronic music laboratory, together with Luis de Pablo and Carmelo Alonso Bernaola. Grants from the Gaudeamus Foundation and the Juan March Foundation allowed him to study with Iannis Xenakis and with Gottfried Michael Koenig at the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht, where he composed Collage (1967) and Joyce's Portrait (1968). His early work showed affinities with Webern before moving toward French Impressionist influences. He died in Madrid in February 2016.

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) was an American psychologist, writer, and advocate for psychedelic research whose cultural influence extended well beyond his academic work. As a musician and recording artist — and in his later career as an enthusiast of early personal computing and virtual reality — he produced several audio projects that engaged with electronic music, including the album You Can Be Anyone This Time Around (1970) and later cyberdelic electronic works. His association with John Lennon, the Grateful Dead, and the broader counterculture gave his musical work a context that cannot be separated from his identity as a cultural provocateur.

Born in Havana in 1967 and a naturalised Mexican citizen, Iván Abreu works across drawing, photography, electronics, software, sound, and industrial design from his base in Mexico City. His practice is built around what he calls the poetics of demonstration — artistic gestures that make visible a hypothesis about physical, social, or political phenomena. He received a Prix Ars Electronica award in 2012 and the CINTAS Foundation Award in Visual Arts in 2011–2012. His work is held in public and private collections including FEMSA and the Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo, and has been supported by FONCA's National System of Art Creators.

Born 8 January 1935 in Tupelo, Mississippi, Elvis Presley moved with his family to Memphis at thirteen and recorded his first sides at Sun Records in 1954, beginning with Arthur Crudup's That's All Right. Produced by Sam Phillips, his early recordings fused country, blues, and rhythm and blues into a style that would catalyse rock and roll. His 1955 contract was acquired by RCA Victor for an unprecedented forty thousand dollars. Three appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 and 1957 made him a national sensation. He died at Graceland on 16 August 1977, aged 42, having recorded eighteen number-one singles and starred in thirty-three films.

AHXAT is a Paris-based project combining visual and sonic practice, created by painter Aude Haefflinger and musician Antoine de Tyssandier. The music side of the project, handled by de Tyssandier, produces abstract, hypnotic electronic music that draws on techno structures while incorporating experimental and eerie atmospheric elements. Releases have appeared on compilations including the Transmit series on Sample+Hold Berlin, placing the project within a European experimental underground that values density and disorientation over accessibility. AHXAT operates across disciplines, with the visual dimension of the work feeding directly into the conceptual framework of the sound.

Based in London, she is an independent researcher and curator whose PhD from Kingston University examined the Audio Arts magazine, a pioneering artist's audio publication. She directs Sound Threshold, an interdisciplinary project exploring the relationships between site, sound and text, and co-authored The Force of Listening with Claudia Firth, published by Errant Bodies Press in 2017. Her research connects feminist theory and consciousness-raising practice with the politics and ethics of listening, and she has developed projects around the feminist art historian Carla Lonzi's text Autoritratto.

Beatriz Ferreyra (b. 1937, Córdoba, Argentina) is an Argentine composer based in France and a pioneering figure in electroacoustic music for over sixty years. After studying piano in Buenos Aires and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, she joined Pierre Schaeffer's Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in 1963, assisting his research for Solfège de l'Objet Sonore.

From 1970 she devoted herself fully to composition, also researching sound structures with Bernard Baschet. Her catalogue — including Echos+ (1978) — is marked by delicate timbral invention and lyrical handling of recorded sound. In 2014 she became an Honorary Member of the International Confederation of Electroacoustic Music.

Shintaro Miyazaki is a Japanese-Swiss media artist and researcher based in Switzerland whose work engages with glitch, algorithmic media, and the aesthetics of machines — particularly the relationship between digital systems and the sonic and visual artifacts they produce when they fail or operate at their margins.

He develops artistic and research projects that investigate the phenomenology of digital media, attending to the ways in which algorithmic processes become perceptible through their errors, their timing, and their material substrate. His work connects the traditions of media art and critical theory with an attentive interest in the aesthetic dimensions of technological process.

Jean-Luc Moulène (b. 1955) is a French artist working with photography, sculpture, and objects whose practice investigates the protocols of representation, institutional power, and the conditions of exchange. His photographic series — including works documenting everyday products, bodies, and environments with a forensic precision that reveals ideological dimensions in ordinary visual culture — approach their subjects with a controlled distance that is analytical and aesthetically forceful. His Objets de grève series presents goods made by workers during factory occupations, transforming tools of labour dispute into objects that activate questions of value, use, and symbolic weight.

Ghislaine Leung (b. 1980) is a British artist whose practice is built on self-imposed constraints to produce sculpture, sound works, and institutional interventions. Her method involves developing rules or parameters for a body of work and adhering to them strictly, producing outcomes that are provisional, site-responsive, and attentive to the social conditions of art production. Sound is central to her practice — deployed as a material that occupies and activates architectural and institutional space without resolving into stable forms. Her work often addresses the hidden labour and economics of cultural production, including childcare, budgets, and institutional time given to artists.

KMRU is the project of Kenyan sound artist Joseph Kamaru (b. 1997), working between Nairobi and Berlin. His practice encompasses field recording, experimental electronics, and sound installation, engaging with the acoustic and social environments of Nairobi while drawing on international traditions of electroacoustic and acousmatic composition. His release Peel (2020) on Editions Mego brought his work to wide international attention, demonstrating an approach simultaneously empirical and emotionally resonant. Kamaru is also active as a curator and researcher developing platforms for experimental music in East Africa, working to diversify a field long dominated by European institutions.

Organum Electronics is the solo electronic project of David Jackman, the British composer and sound artist who has worked under the name Organum since the 1980s. Where Organum's acoustic and ensemble work drew on Orthodox chant, drone, and resonance, Organum Electronics moves these interests into purely electronic territory — synthesiser tones, digital processing, and sustained frequencies that share the same ritual patience and timbral austerity of the acoustic projects. Releasing on Sonoris and other labels, the recordings continue Jackman's characteristic approach: extremely slow, deeply focused, and indifferent to convention.

Michael Vorfeld is a Berlin-based German musician and media artist who plays percussion and self-designed string instruments, and realizes electroacoustic and audio-visual installations. He is best known for Glühlampenmusik (Light Bulb Music), a project developed since the mid-1980s, in which incandescent light bulbs and switching elements generate sound through the relationship between current, filament vibration, and microphone pickup. The flickering and pulsation of the bulbs produces music in which light and sound become inseparable. Vorfeld has documented successive volumes on Karlrecords, marking the project's 20th anniversary with a 2025 release refining its vocabulary of flicker.

Gilbert Proesch, born in South Tyrol in 1943, and George Passmore, born in Plymouth in 1942, met on 25 September 1967 while studying sculpture at Saint Martin's School of Art in London and have worked together ever since. Declaring their entire lives a form of sculpture, they developed their signature large-scale photomontages in the 1970s, combining images of themselves — always in matching business attire — with material addressing sexuality, race, death, and British society. Their work is held by the Tate and major international collections. They married in 2008 and celebrated fifty years of collaboration in 2017.

Born in 1970 in South Holland, Illinois, he moved to Chicago in 1991 and emerged from the city's improvised music scene as one of the foremost prepared guitar players of the 1990s, applying magnets, binder clips, chains, and a violin bow to the instrument. He later shifted to laptop and modular synthesizer, spanning harsh noise, drone, and near-silent ambient. His 2002 album Sheer Hellish Miasma on Mego drew unusual attention for a noise record, appearing in Pitchfork's year-end list. He has collaborated extensively with Jim O'Rourke, Mats Gustafsson, and Taku Sugimoto.

Born in Mexico City in 1956, he studied composition with Mario Lavista before moving to the United States and then to Britain, where he attended the Royal College of Music and City University London. Among the best-known Mexican composers of his generation, he built a career at the intersection of electroacoustic music and Latin American musical traditions. His work Temazcal (1984), pitting maracas against an electroacoustic backdrop, became a landmark of the genre, while Mannam (1992), juxtaposing Korean and Mexican folk elements, received a Prix Ars Electronica distinction in 1993. He died in Mérida, Yucatán in May 2023.

Founded in Stockholm in 2014 by composers Marta Forsberg and Lo Kristenson during their studies at the Royal College of Music, this is a network for composers and sound artists who identify as women, non-binary, or transgender. Working as an intersectional feminist organisation, it runs workshops, concerts, and curatorial projects oriented toward collectivity and challenging established aesthetics in contemporary music. In 2019 it received the Framtidens Musikpris from STIM and the National Association for Young Musicians in recognition of its contribution to diversifying the new music field.

Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431–1506) was an Italian Renaissance painter and engraver renowned for his rigorous use of perspective, archaeological precision, and sculptural treatment of the human figure. Working primarily in Padua and Mantua, where he served as court artist to the Gonzaga family, he brought a severe, classicizing style to religious and mythological subjects.

His most celebrated works include the frescoes of the Camera degli Sposi, with its illusionistic oculus ceiling, and the dramatically foreshortened Lamentation of Christ. Mantegna's innovations in perspective, and his widely circulated engravings, influenced painters across Northern and Southern Europe.

Formed by Roc Jiménez de Cisneros and Scottish artist Stephen Sharp, EVOL approaches computer music as a site of deformation and conceptual excess. Their project — which Jiménez de Cisneros founded in 1996 and has co-directed since alongside the ALKU label, run with Anna Ramos since 1997 — applies algorithmic processes to the aesthetics of rave and post-acid house culture, producing work that distorts familiar club forms beyond recognition. Recordings have appeared on Diagonal, Editions Mego, Presto!?, and Entr'acte. A sustained strand of their work has involved reinterpretations of German artist Hanne Darboven's Opus 17a, begun in 2014.

Mexican sound artist, field recordist, and researcher who holds a PhD in Art History and a Master's degree in Visual Arts from UNAM, where she is a member of the Arte+Ciencia interdisciplinary research group. Also known as Leena Lee, her practice is grounded in soundscape ecology, bioacoustics, and ecoacoustics, examining the resonant relationships between human and non-human animals and their environments. She hosts the radio programme Surfaceless, the skin is not the limit, which promotes active listening and presents work in sound ecology and experimental music. Her research has engaged international forums exploring the intersections of biology, acoustics, and artistic practice.

Jean Ritchie (1922–2015) was an American folk singer and dulcimer player from Viper, Kentucky, widely regarded as the mother of the folk revival. Born into a large Appalachian family with a rich oral tradition of British ballads and local songs, she brought this tradition to urban audiences through recordings, performances, and teaching from the late 1940s onward. Her Elektra Records recordings and her book Singing Family of the Cumberlands (1955) were foundational texts for the American folk revival, directly influencing Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. She was also a pioneering advocate for Appalachian culture and environmental justice in her region.

Zev Greenfield is a Brooklyn-based arts administrator who has served as Executive Director and Chief Curator of ISSUE Project Room since 2015, leading the experimental performance and sound art space in Downtown Brooklyn.

A chartered accountant with degrees from Monash University and Columbia Business School, he previously held finance and management roles at the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation, Robert Wilson's artist residency organization. At ISSUE he oversees programming spanning sound, music, performance, and literature, and in 2021 secured the deed transfer for the Boerum Place theater, securing its future as a venue for experimental practice.

New York-based artist whose practice moves between conceptual scores, sound, and installation. His project Favorite Recorded Scream (2008–2009) involved visiting every record store in Manhattan to ask employees to name their favourite scream from recorded music, compiling the responses into a single record. Underground Sculpture (2012–2014) deployed a variable-pitch metal detector to generate auditory topographical maps of buried terrain, turning subsurface material into sound. Recordings made at High Desert Test Sites in Joshua Tree have also shaped his output. Releases appear primarily through Small World Manufacturing.

Thomas Ankersmit is a Dutch musician and artist based in Amsterdam and Berlin. He is best known for his work with the Serge modular synthesizer, which he has played in a highly distinctive way since the early 2000s — producing music that combines harsh, physically intense frequencies with precise timbral control and spatial awareness. His performances are often presented in multichannel formats that allow sound to move through and inhabit architectural space.

Ankersmit has released work on Shelter Press and Edições CN, including Figueroa Terrace (2013) and Homage to Dick Raaijmakers (2016), the latter a tribute to the Dutch electronic music pioneer.

C.M. von Hausswolff (Carl Michael von Hausswolff, b. 1956) is a Swedish artist and composer working primarily with frequency-based and electronic sound installations. His work uses specific frequencies, tones, and electromagnetic phenomena to create immersive environments that act directly on the listener's physiology and psychology. He has collaborated with Thomas Liljenberg and has released on Touch and Editions Mego. As curator, he co-founded Radium Audio. Father of Anna von Hauswolff, he has maintained a central role in European sound installation and conceptual art.

Formed in 2007 by two musicians who played together in the canteen of the Faculty of Cultural Sciences at the University of Indonesia, the group blends folk, keroncong, and jazz into a sound defined by gentle melodies and poetic Indonesian lyrics. Founding vocalist Mohammad Istiqamah Djamad and bassist Comi Comi established the band's character before expanding the lineup. Their 2017 single Akad from the album Ruang Tunggu spread widely online and brought them national prominence. The group has since undergone changes in membership and continues performing under the name Parade Hujan.

Ivo Malec (1925–2019) was a Croatian-French composer and a central figure at the GRM in Paris. Moving to Paris in 1959, he became closely associated with Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète movement while also maintaining a significant output as an orchestral and chamber composer. His electroacoustic works — including Cantate pour elle (1966) and Arco (1969) — balance the abstract procedures of musique concrète with a lyricism rooted in his Central European musical formation. He taught composition for many years at the Paris Conservatoire and was a formative influence on several generations of French electroacoustic composers.

Electronic music producer and sound designer from Mexico City, she emerged in 2016 with the self-released debut Female Criminals Vol. 1 on her own Motus Records label. Describing herself as an architect of sound rather than a traditional musician, she works through frequencies, textures, and timbres rather than conventional harmony. Recognised as the only female Ableton Certified Trainer in Latin America, she released her debut album Die Kraft in 2020, presented as an immersive multimedia live show in collaboration with Mexican new media studio Fragments and Forms. She has since relocated to Berlin, where her AV performances have placed her on the international techno circuit.

Born in 1967, she lives and works in Vienna and has been a defining presence in the Austrian experimental scene since the late 1990s. Self-taught within the DIY noise and electronic music culture of Vienna at the turn of the millennium, her work investigates the links between visual and auditory perception, using monitors, cameras, a self-built videosynth, bass guitar, and feedback systems. She has presented audiovisual performances and installations at the Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, the Berlinale, and the Biennale of Sao Paulo. In 2009 she received the Austrian Outstanding Artist Award for innovative film art.

Sven Berg is a German artist and sound practitioner based in Kassel. A student at Kunsthochschule Kassel, his practice since 2021 focuses on making sound visible through self-built machines and devices that generate a dynamic interplay between tones and visual forms. Working under the alias Monoyama, he has exhibited at BBK Kassel (documenta-Halle, 2023) with laser projections responding in real time to his audio compositions. His work engages with the Range Festival and explores solar energy as an artistic and ecological material.

The Boredoms are an Osaka-based experimental group led by Yamantaka Eye, formed in 1986. Beginning as a chaotic noise-punk ensemble releasing on Shimmy-Disc and Reprise, they evolved through contact with American noise rock — touring with Sonic Youth and Nirvana — toward increasingly abstract and ritualistic territory. Super æ (1998) and Vision Creation Newsun (1999) marked a shift toward ecstatic drone-rock built on interlocking drum patterns. Their large-scale performances — featuring 77 drummers simultaneously at one point — extended the practice into durational and participatory forms. They remain active in various configurations.

Born in Cairo in 1921, El-Dabh is often credited with producing the earliest known work of electronic music: his 1944 "Wire Recorder Piece," made by processing sounds from a zār ritual, predates the European musique concrète movement by several years. He moved to the United States on a Fulbright fellowship in 1950 and worked at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in the late 1950s. His ballet score for Martha Graham's Clytemnestra became a landmark in American dance, and his sound-and-light composition for the pyramids at Giza, created at the request of President Nasser, has been performed nightly since 1961. He died in 2017.

Víctor Mazón Gardoqui is a Spanish artist and researcher based in Germany and Spain whose practice spans site-specific performance, sound installation, and experimental electronics. Employing an empirical approach to sound, light, and custom hardware, his work examines perception and altered states, addressing the inaccessible and provoking vulnerability and awareness in the viewer. His work has been presented in museums, galleries, urban screens, and broadcast contexts across Europe, Africa, North and South America.

Regis is the alias of Karl O'Connor, a Birmingham-based techno producer and DJ whose work on Downwards Records — the label he co-founded with Miles Whittaker in the early 1990s — is foundational to industrial techno and the harder British variant of the genre that developed outside Detroit's influence. His productions are characterized by extreme percussion density, industrial texture, and a darkness that connects Birmingham's industrial past with the club-music present.

O'Connor has also worked as Sandwell District, with female (the duo with Miles Whittaker), and in various other collaborative configurations, each exploring different aspects of severe electronic music.

Born in Sydney in 1969, he began performing as a jazz drummer before shifting to guitar in the late 1980s, developing an approach that routes the instrument through electronic processing to produce sustained drones, textural noise, and slow rhythmic cycles far removed from conventional playing. He co-organised the What Is Music? festival in Australia for a decade with Robbie Avenaim and has released collaborative albums with Jim O'Rourke. His solo records include Sagittarian Domain, Quixotism, and Hubris, and since 2009 he has run the Black Truffle label from Berlin.

The recording name of Roger Karmanik, born in 1965 in Sweden and founder of the Cold Meat Industry record label, Brighter Death Now has been active in death industrial, power electronics, and dark ambient since the late 1980s. Early recordings were largely instrumental and atmospheric, while later work incorporated screamed, heavily distorted vocals alongside thematic material addressing psychosis, sadism, and mortality. Collector releases including The Great Death trilogy have become sought-after rarities. Karmanik closed Cold Meat Industry around 2014 after citing the toll the label took on his health.

Furt is a British live electronics duo comprising Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer, founded in 1986. Working with self-developed software and live digital processing of acoustic materials, they create densely layered, abruptly shifting improvised works that sit within the tradition of European free improvisation while making full use of digital technology. Releases on Matchless Recordings and their own channels document a practice of extreme rhythmic complexity and timbral range. Barrett is also active as a notated composer; Obermayer focuses on performance software development. They have collaborated with Evan Parker and many others.

Whitehouse is a British power electronics group founded by William Bennett in 1980, one of the most extreme, confrontational, and influential acts in noise and industrial music. Their recordings for Come Org and Susan Lawly — featuring aggressive synthesizers, distorted vocals, and lyrics of deliberate provocation around themes of violence and sexual extremity — are foundational texts in power electronics and remain genuinely difficult to encounter.

The original lineup included Philip Best and Peter Sotos (who was convicted of obscenity charges in 1986 for possessing child pornography, an event that became part of the group's notoriety).

The Adicts are a British punk band formed in Ipswich in 1975. Known for their theatrical approach — combining the energy of British punk with commedia dell'arte imagery, bowler hats, and Clockwork Orange-inspired aesthetics — they were part of the second wave of UK punk in the early 1980s. Albums including Sound of Music (1982) and Songs of Praise (1983) on Fall Out Records established a devoted following that has proved remarkably durable internationally, particularly in the United States and Japan. They continue to tour and remain an active presence in the international punk underground.

Mats Erlandsson is a Stockholm-based Swedish composer and musician working in pipe organ, electronics, and drone. His compositions explore sustained tone, microtonal tuning, and the intersection of acoustic and electronic sound, contributing to a distinctly Scandinavian approach to contemporary experimental music rooted in long-form duration and spectral depth. He has performed and released work through Ideal Recordings and related contexts in the Swedish experimental scene, and has collaborated with Maria W Horn in extended organ and electronic drone works that push the boundaries of acoustic instrument tradition.

Laurie Anderson is an American artist born in 1947, a musician and filmmaker whose work encompasses performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performative projects in New York City during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery. She achieved unexpected commercial success when her song “O Superman” reached number two on the UK singles chart in 1981. Anderson’s debut studio album, “Big Science” was released in 1982 and has since been followed by several studio and live albums. She starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave.

Aristophanes (c. 446 – c. 386 BCE) was an Athenian playwright of Old Comedy, the only complete comic plays to survive from classical Greece. His surviving works — including The Clouds, The Birds, Lysistrata, and The Frogs — combine political satire, mythological parody, and bawdy humor with experimental verbal invention, from invented compound words to choruses of croaking frogs and squabbling birds.

His plays skewered Athenian figures such as Socrates, Cleon, and Euripides, blending fantasy and reality through absurd premises — a sex strike to end war, a journey to heaven on a giant dung beetle — that established comedy as a vehicle for social and political critique.

Jean-Claude Risset (1938–2016) was a French composer and computer music pioneer. A student of André Jolivet and later a collaborator with Max Mathews at Bell Laboratories, he made foundational contributions to the analysis and synthesis of musical timbre through computer music, including the famous Risset glissando — a continuously rising or falling tone that never actually changes pitch, exploiting auditory paradox. His compositions, created at IRCAM and across six decades of work, integrate his scientific research into musical form with results of remarkable sensory richness. He was one of the key figures linking the scientific and musical dimensions of electroacoustic practice.

Yolande Harris is a British artist, composer, and researcher whose practice spans sound, moving image, installation, and environmental media. Her work investigates the relationships between perception, technology, ecology, and place, combining scientific inquiry with poetic forms of listening and observation. Through immersive audiovisual works, field-based research, and site-responsive projects, Harris explores how sound reveals hidden structures within natural and built environments. Her projects have been presented internationally in museums, galleries, and festivals. She creates works encouraging reflection on connections between humans, landscapes, and technological systems.

Born in Japan in 1978, Taeji Sawai works across sound design, composition, and audiovisual performance. Since 2000 he has performed internationally as part of the pioneering audiovisual unit portable[k]ommunity, collaborating with artists including Daito Manabe and EYE of Boredoms. With EYE and art engineer Kazuhiro Jo he formed the unit AEO, performing at the DEAF festival in the Netherlands and Fuji Rock in 2008. In 2009 he founded the creative studio Qosmo. His installation Sound of Honda / Ayrton Senna 1989 reconstructed Senna's 1989 Suzuka qualifying lap through sound and light, winning the Grand Prix at Cannes Lions and a Black Pencil at D&AD in 2014.

Michele Anelli is an Italian double bassist, improviser, and sound artist based in Turin. Moving from electric bass in noise and post-punk groups to double bass and free improvisation, he works through extended techniques, field recordings, and electronics, seeking what he describes as pure sound — a utopian return to a language before language. He performs in the duo Oort with Nicholas Remondino, the trio Vòrti with Michel Doneda, and the electronic project Tzaumness. He has collaborated with Evan Parker, Phil Niblock, and Giuseppe Ielasi, and released on Kirigirisu, Neus-318, Tour de Bras, and Invisibilia Editions. He organised the Noise Delivery Festival in Turin for five years.

Ade Adepitan (b. 1973) is a British-Nigerian television presenter, broadcaster, and former Paralympic wheelchair basketball player. Born in Lagos, he contracted polio as an infant and moved to London with his family as a child, later becoming a key member of the Great Britain wheelchair basketball team and winning bronze at the 2004 Athens Paralympics.

Since retiring from competitive sport, he has built a career as a documentary presenter, fronting travel and current-affairs programs for the BBC and Channel 4 that often explore disability, global development, and his own Nigerian heritage, bringing a personal and exploratory voice to mainstream broadcast journalism.

Vladislav Delay is an alias of Finnish musician and producer Sasu Ripatti, born in 1976 in Turku. Under this name he developed a practice of micro-tonal electronic music, dub-influenced structures, and highly processed percussion released primarily on Mille Plateaux and Chain Reaction. Albums including Ele (2000) and Multila (2001) were central to the micro-house and abstract techno scenes of the early 2000s. He also records under the name Luomo, exploring more song-oriented electronic music, and as Uusitalo. He is based in Berlin and continues to release and perform internationally.

Australian musician and cultural organiser born in 1978 in Melbourne, long based in Berlin as co-founder of NK Projekt — an artist-run non-profit in a former Neukölln chocolate factory dedicated to sound art and experimental music from 2008 until its closure after Berlin funding withdrew. He performs using hand-built instruments, prepared guitars, and analogue electronics across projects including Last Dominion Lost, Matarratas, and his solo project Ratbag. Through NK he helped build one of Berlin's most important grassroots platforms for experimental and underground sound culture.

Born in 1967 in Sigmaringen, Germany, he lives and works in Berlin. His practice brings together kinetic objects, sound, scent, and absurdist social intervention to probe the edges of public and political space. The sculpture Large Wind Chime generates deep dissonant tones derived from the tritone and the Arab 17-tone scale. Solo exhibitions include a survey at the Vienna Secession in 2008 and projects at Frieze Projects London, Mori Art Museum Tokyo, Hayward Gallery London, Nottingham Contemporary, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin. He is represented by Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.

JK Flesh is a solo electronic project by Justin Broadrick, the Birmingham-born musician best known as founding vocalist and guitarist of Godflesh, one of the earliest bands to merge extreme metal with industrial music. Where Godflesh and his project Jesu are guitar-centred, JK Flesh channels a separate strand rooted in electronic production, shaped by his 1990s collaboration with Kevin Martin in Techno Animal. The project shifted gradually from industrial-influenced club music toward minimal, dub-inflected techno. Broadrick has released four studio albums and multiple EPs under the JK Flesh name since 2012, alongside a split with Prurient.

Kostis Kilymis is a Greek sound artist and musician based in the United Kingdom whose practice centers on improvisation with electronics, reel-to-reel tape, and custom software. His work investigates the texture and temporality of electronic sound in live performance contexts, creating pieces that unfold through subtle and unpredictable transformation. He has released on Organized Music from Thessaloniki and other specialist labels and has collaborated with artists in European improvised music communities. His practice maintains a rigorous engagement with the live event as the primary context for musical meaning.

Active in Turin since 1996, he is a self-taught composer and sound artist who pursued further research in computer music at LaSDIM, the laboratory for experimentation in musical informatics. His practice spans electroacoustic and concrete music, field recording, and ethnological research, and he has been a consistent organiser of experimental music events in Turin. Among his projects are the collaborative groups Blind Beast and Malaria POP, and his solo releases include The Woodcarver, works drawing on field recordings from across northern Italy.

Alejandra Salinas (born 1977, La Rioja, Spain) and Aeron Bergman (born 1971, Detroit) are an artist duo based in Detroit working across media, performance, sound, and sculpture. Their early recordings are among the first to combine folk and laptop electronic music; their work Ruinas Encantadas received an honorary mention at Prix Ars Electronica in 2001. They have released twelve full-length audio works on labels including Fat Cat, Orthlorng Musork, and Tomlab, and ran the Lucky Kitchen imprint releasing work by Pauline Oliveros and others. They founded the Institute for New Connotative Action (INCA) and have exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, and Van Abbemuseum.

Alessandro Bosetti, born in 1973 in Milan and now based in Marseille, is a composer and sound artist who deconstructs language, voice and speech through radio plays, performances and electroacoustic compositions. His hybrid works sit between music, documentary and conceptual art, often exploring the musicality hidden within everyday utterance and the fringe area between spoken language and abstract sound. He has developed a personal language that treats voice as both material and meaning. Works such as Mask and Comma have been broadcast internationally and released on Senufo Editions.

Yasumme Morishige is a Japanese artist and sound practitioner whose work engages with improvisation, extended instrumental technique, and the physical dimensions of performance. Based in Japan and active in experimental music contexts, Morishige participates in a tradition of Japanese free music that connects the bodily act of performance to wider investigations of sound, space, and time. His practice reflects an interest in how performers develop relationships with their instruments and each performance's conditions, treating improvisation as inquiry rather than spontaneity. Working primarily on cello and voice, Morishige collaborates widely with musicians and dancers in Japan and abroad.

Alison Knowles (b. 1933, New York) is an American Fluxus artist whose work — spanning performance, print, artist books, and installation — has been one of the most consistent and generative in the Fluxus tradition for over sixty years. She was one of the few women central to the original Fluxus circle, alongside George Maciunas, John Cage, and Dick Higgins, whom she married.

Her event scores, beginning with Shuffle (1961) and Make a Salad (1962), transform everyday actions — cooking, walking, cleaning — into performance events that foreground the poetic significance of ordinary life.

Born in Houston, Texas on 30 May 1932, she was a composer, accordionist, and central figure in postwar experimental and electronic music. A founding member and director of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the early 1960s, she coined the term Deep Listening after a 1988 recording session in an underground cistern in Port Townsend, Washington, where sound decayed over forty-five seconds. The practice she developed transformed approaches to improvisation, composition, and collective attention. She established the Pauline Oliveros Foundation in 1985, later renamed the Deep Listening Institute. She died on 24 November 2016.

Born in 1993 in Sweden, she is the daughter of Wire bassist Graham Lewis and began making music in 2009. Her debut album Ett, released on Editions Mego in 2014, subjects field recordings and organic sound to electronic manipulation, creating intimate and fractured sonic worlds. A second album, Too, followed on the same label, with the 2018 collaboration Care with Simon Fisher Turner also released on Mego. Her 2024 album Thankful, dedicated to the late Editions Mego founder Peter Rehberg, appeared a decade after her debut. She performs audio-visual shows at clubs and galleries and has appeared at Atonal Berlin, Mutek, Sonar Barcelona, and Dark Mofo.

Zamudin Guchev is a Circassian musician, craftsman, and cultural guardian based in the Republic of Adygea, Russia. A central figure in the preservation of ancient Adyghe heritage, he founded the ensemble ZHEW to perform on reconstructed traditional Circassian instruments. His revival of the shychepshyn — the Adyghe bowed fiddle — is credited with saving the instrument from disappearance. He also plays the shetcha pshen and Circassian horn, and performs in spaces designed to evoke the traditional Adyghe guesthouse. Most contemporary musicians of the Adyghe tradition were trained by him or shaped by his work.

Demna Gvasalia (b. 1981, Sukhumi, Georgia) is a Georgian fashion designer who became one of the most influential figures in contemporary fashion. After fleeing Georgia during the civil conflict of the 1990s, he studied fashion design in Antwerp and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, which shaped the strong conceptual basis of his work.

He co-founded the collective Vetements in 2014 with his brother Guram, producing fashion that combined irony, dystopian aesthetics, and references to streetwear, workwear, and post-Soviet imagery in ways that proved enormously influential.

Maja Ratkje (born 1973) is a Norwegian composer, vocalist, and electronic musician based in Oslo. A founding member of the improvisational quartet SPUNK and the duo Fe-Mail, she developed a practice centred on extended vocal technique and live electronics — producing work that ranges from noise and free improvisation to commissioned orchestral composition. Her solo Voice (2002) on Rune Grammofon is a landmark of extended vocal performance. She has received numerous Norwegian and international commissions and awards, and collaborates extensively with visual artists and choreographers.

Originally from Germany, Brooklyn-based, Daniel Neumann is a sound artist and audio engineer who holds a master's degree in media art from the Academy of Visual Art Leipzig and studied electronic music composition in Catania, Italy. He runs CT::SWaM, a Berlin and New York event series focused on spatial sound and focused listening, with a dedicated eight-channel room at Fridman Gallery. His installations and performances have been presented at MoMA PS1, the Sculpture Center, Eyebeam, and the Rubin Museum, where he was acoustic designer of The World Is Sound. He served as house sound engineer at MoMA PS1 from 2013 to 2016.

Born in Edinburgh in 1944, Alan Lamb spent most of his life in Western Australia, working as a biomedical research scientist — he held a PhD in neurophysiology from the University of Edinburgh — while developing a singular practice in sound art. He is best known for large-scale aeolian installations using contact microphones to capture the vibrations of kilometre-long telegraph wires on a twelve-acre property in Baldivis, south of Perth. His album Primal Image documents these recordings, and his collaboration with Sarah Hopkins, Sky Song, was released on Vox Australis in 1989. Further recordings appeared on the Dorobo label. He died in Perth on 19 April 2025, aged 81.

Born in Mexico City in 1974, she works across sound installation, text, and performance, investigating translation between linguistic, visual, and phonic systems. A 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, she received the Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction in Hybrid Arts in 2013. In 2015 she co-represented Mexico at the 56th Venice Biennale with the project Possessing Nature alongside Luis Felipe Ortega. Following a 2018 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship and a residency at Arts at CERN in Geneva, she developed Quantum Prelude (2022), a two-channel audiovisual work with octophonic sound premiered at UNAM's Sculptural Space in Mexico City.

American experimental musician working primarily in harsh noise and sound art, he releases records on labels including No Rent Records, Flag Day Recordings, and Industrial Coast. His approach blends digital sampling and synthesis with what he describes as an old-school tape noise sensibility inflected by glitchy computer processing. Notable releases include Halcyon Days (2024) and There's Something in the Backyard. As part of the duo ACID with musician Imaad Wasif, he records using rewired keyboards, detuned guitars, and home-built instruments, including an amplified two-by-four, releasing through Narnack Records.

Stephen O’Malley is a guitarist, producer, composer, and visual artist whose drone and experimental music groups — SUNN O))), KTL, and Khanate among the best known — have defined his practice for over two decades. His work is marked by breadth and multidisciplinary reach, encompassing collaborations with Scott Walker, Kali Malone, Alvin Lucier, choreographer Gisèle Vienne, Peter Rehberg, Jim Jarmusch, and research centres including IRCAM, INA-GRM (Paris), and EMS (Stockholm). He is also active as a graphic designer and visual artist.

Sukandar Kartadinata is a Berlin-based musician and instrument builder who navigates between modern technologies and traditional craft. His musical background combines classical guitar, high-school prog rock, no-wave fake jazz, gamelan, and DIY synth and FX circuits — a mix he refined in the mid-1990s while working at the music technology institutions ZKM (Karlsruhe), STEIM (Amsterdam), and CNMAT (Berkeley), and through the Topophonien project. He studied computer science at FH Karlsruhe. His instruments are built from code and microchips rather than wood and brass, and are typically custom-made to the specific needs of individual musicians or media artists.

Born in Guatemala City in 1992, Mabe Fratti is a classically trained cellist and vocalist who relocated to Mexico City in 2015 through a Goethe Institute residency, quickly becoming a central figure in its experimental and free-improvising scene. Her solo debut Pies Sobre La Tierra appeared in 2019, followed by Se Ve Desde Aquí in 2022 and Sentir Que No Sabes in 2024. She is a member of the avant-garde collective Amor Muere and records with partner Héctor Tosta as Titanic. Her practice layers extended cello technique with processing and voice, resisting easy genre categorisation.

Born in Creil, France in 1947, he is a composer of musique concrète and a theorist whose writings on sound and image have shaped contemporary film studies. He began his career as an assistant to Pierre Schaeffer at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1970, composing works including Requiem, which received the Grand Prix du Disque in 1978. His 1990 book L'Audio-Vision, published in English as Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen by Columbia University Press, introduced concepts including synchresis and the acousmêtre that remain central to sound studies. He has authored more than thirty books on sound, music, and film.

Leyland Kirby is a British artist and musician best known for The Caretaker project, through which he developed a long-running exploration of memory, deterioration, and dementia using decayed ballroom recordings processed into increasingly fragmented states. The project culminated in the six-part Everywhere at the End of Time (2016–2019), a six-stage representation of dementia's progression that reached a wide audience. Under his own name he has released more personal and emotionally direct recordings. He has also released under the V/Vm alias, known for provocative sampling and noise-adjacent work.

Rashad Becker was born in Syria and emigrated to Europe in his youth, eventually settling in Berlin where he began experimenting with sounds in empty buildings and developing his practice as a composer and sound engineer. As an engineer at Berlin's Dubplates & Mastering, he has mastered and cut over 1200 dance, electronic, and experimental albums, shaping the sonic character of an enormous range of recordings by other artists. He also runs his own mastering studio, Clunk.

His composer credits are far fewer — only two solo releases bear his name — but his debut on PAN, Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. 1 (2013), was one of the most discussed experimental albums of that year.

Bárbara Lázara was born in Mexico City in 1976 and has spent more than two decades developing a practice that moves between performative, sonorous, and discursive elements of the body, voice, and space. Her work navigates an uncertain relationship with the unspeakable — the phantasmagorical and empyrean — creating grounds for critical reflection on history, gender, and memory.

Her performances situate the audience as active receivers invited into a dialogue conducted through paths other than language's usual impositions.

Born in Madrid in 1966, he lives and works between Madrid and Mexico City, producing performance, installation, video, and photography that expose the mechanisms of capitalist labour and social exclusion. His practice frequently involves paying marginalised individuals to perform degrading or physically demanding tasks, implicating both art institutions and viewers in the structures he critiques. Among his best-known interventions is a 2003 work at the Venice Biennale in which the Spanish pavilion was sealed and made accessible only to holders of Spanish passports.

Yasunao Tone (1935–2023) was a Japanese multidisciplinary artist born in Tokyo who worked in New York City for much of his career. After graduating from Chiba University in 1957 with a major in Japanese Literature, he became an important figure in postwar Japanese art during the 1960s — a central member of Group Ongaku, one of the earliest collective explorations of free improvisation and noise in Japan.

He was also associated with Neo-Dada Organizers, Hi-Red Center, and Team Random (the first computer art group organized in Japan), and was a member of Fluxus.

Borbetomagus is an American free jazz and noise trio formed in New York in 1979, consisting of tenor saxophonists Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich alongside guitarist Don Bugenhagen. Their music is known for its ferocious and unrelenting intensity — improvised performances in which the three players pursue individual trajectories of extreme sound simultaneously, producing dense textures of overwhelming sonic energy.

The group occupies an unusual position in experimental music: their approach is rooted in free jazz tradition but pushes that tradition into noise and industrial territory through sheer volume, extended technique, and refusal of any musical accommodation.

David Grubbs is an American musician and writer based in Brooklyn, best known as a founding member of Gastr del Sol and earlier member of Squirrel Bait and Bastro. His solo recordings — on Drag City and Blue Chopsticks — develop an idiosyncratic approach to song and composition that incorporates noise, improvisation, and literary influence. He is also a prolific writer whose books Records Ruin the Landscape (2014) and Now that the Audience is Assembled (2018) engage critically with experimental music's relationship to recording, documentation, and listening.

Born in Glasgow in 1981, she studied at Edinburgh College of Art and completed an MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2007. Her graduation work Vatnajökull (the sound of) connected a submerged microphone under Europe's largest glacier to a public telephone number, allowing anyone to hear the glacier melting in real time. In 2014 she launched Future Library, a 100-year artwork in Oslo in which one author per year submits a manuscript to be printed and read only in 2114, with contributors including Margaret Atwood and Han Kang. She is based in Fife, Scotland.

Killawatt is a British producer and DJ whose music combines the weight and physicality of dubstep and drum and bass with industrial, drone, and noise elements. Releasing on Deep Dark and Dangerous, Samurai Horo, and other labels, his productions pursue a kind of organised brutalism — heavy engineering within dark atmospheric contexts. He is associated with the British bass music underground and a cohort of producers who extended post-dubstep aesthetics toward experimental and industrial territory. He performs regularly in UK and European club and festival contexts.

Étant Donnés was formed in Rabat, Morocco, in 1977 by brothers Eric and Marc Hurtado. They quickly became essential figures in the intersection of experimental film, performance, and musique concrète, recording approximately thirty albums and counting numerous collaborations with major artists of the international music scene including Alan Vega (Suicide), Genesis P-Orridge (Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV), Michael Gira (Swans), Lydia Lunch, Philippe Grandrieux, Mark Cunningham, and Vomir.

Their name references Marcel Duchamp's final major artwork Étant Donnés (1946–66) — a title that also doubles as a kind of proposition: given that.

Alejandra Pérez Nuñez (born 1972, Punta Arenas) is a Chilean noise artist, hacktivist, and media designer based in Valparaíso, working under the alias elpueblodechina. Trained at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, her practice spans noise performance, radio art, installation, and land art with a sustained focus on Antarctica and imperceptible electromagnetic sound. Her Wave Farm commission Un elemento en común alfa (2014) recorded VLF and hydrophone signals across the Antarctic passage; her exhibition Hacking Antarctica (London Gallery West, 2019) proposes hacking as an onto-epistemological method. She has shown at Transmediale, Piksel, Wave Farm, and Museo Reina Sofía.

Raised near Cesena in north-east Italy, Enrico Malatesta began playing drums in his mid-teens before enrolling in the classical percussion course at the conservatory there. He moved into free improvisation and experimental music, developing a practice that concentrates on surface textures, minimal gesture, and the morphology of materials rather than conventional drumming. He has performed at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, Berghain in Berlin, the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, and Blank Forms in New York. Significant partnerships include a duo with Swiss percussionist Christian Wolfarth and an electro-acoustic trio with Lorenzo Senni and Riccardo Baruzzi.

Born in Mexico City in 1976, he studied composition at the Conservatory of Rotterdam and received a Master in Sonology from the Institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague before completing a PhD at the University of Birmingham, where he was a member of BEAST — Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre. His work applies computer-aided algorithmic processes and stochastic models, building on Iannis Xenakis's theoretical legacy. Based in Madrid, he directs the Master in Electroacoustic Composition at the Centro Superior Katarina Gurska and curates the contemporary music festival VANG at the Cybele Palace.

Stavanger-born vocalist Stine Janvin is active in experimental music, sound, and audiovisual performance, with a special interest in the ambiguous and unrecognisable qualities of the voice.

Janvin’s 2018 album, Fake Synthetic Music, released on interdisciplinary label PAN, brought the artist international critical acclaim for her singular examination of how the voice can be disconnected from its natural, human connotations. The record is but one of many iterations that test the resonant possibilities of spaces, from theatres to clubs to galleries, through a driving vocal imitation of melodic synth sequences.

Gottfried Michael König (1926–2021) was a German-Dutch composer, born in Magdeburg, and one of the pioneers of electronic music in Europe. From 1954 to 1964 he worked at the WDR electronic music studio in Cologne, producing his own works Klangfiguren, Essay, and Terminus 1 while assisting Stockhausen on Gesang der Jünglinge and Kontakte, and Ligeti on Artikulation.

In 1964 he moved to Utrecht, directing what became the Institute of Sonology until 1986. There he developed the computer composition programs Project 1 and Project 2, formalising algorithmic approaches to musical structure. He taught generations of composers and published six volumes of theory, Ästhetische Praxis.

Kathy Hinde is a British audio-visual artist and composer whose practice centres on kinetic sound sculptures, newly invented instruments, and site-specific installations inspired by natural phenomena. She works with handmade objects, electronics, and blends of digital and analogue systems, often generative and evolving in form. Her work has toured extensively across Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Australasia. Awards include the Ivor Novello Award for Sound Art (2020), British Composer Award in Sonic Art (2017), Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention (2015), and an Honorary Doctorate from Bath Spa University (2023).

Fernando Vigueras is a Mexican guitarist, improviser, and sound artist based in Mexico City whose practice centers on experimental approaches to the guitar and free improvisation, questioning the objectual nature of instruments and exploring concrete forms of sound production. He holds a degree in guitar and an MA in Interpretation from UNAM's Facultad de Música, and is a member of Generación Espontánea and the ensemble Cuatro Minimal. He curated the festival Articulaciones del silencio at UNAM's Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo. His collaborators include Carmina Escobar and Ute Wassermann, and his work probes the boundary between instrument, object, and sound.

Demetrio Stratos (1945–1979) was a Greek-Italian vocalist and musician, lead singer of the Italian prog-rock group Area and an extraordinary experimental vocalist. His solo work explored the extreme physical possibilities of the voice — multiphonics, overtone singing, percussive techniques — in ways that were both scientifically rigorous and dramatically compelling. He collaborated with John Cage and with researchers at the Milanese Institute for musical psychology. He died of a rare blood disease at 34, leaving a small but astonishing body of recorded solo work.

Born in Mexico City on 10 April 1943, he studied composition with Nadia Boulanger and Messiaen in Paris (1965–69), and attended courses by Xenakis, Stockhausen, and Ligeti. From 1974 he has been a researcher at UNAM's Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, where he developed a General Theory of Intervallic Classes addressing the continuum of pitch and duration across macro- and micro-intervallic scales. He has written approximately a hundred articles translated into five languages, and edited La Música de México, the most comprehensive publication on Mexican music history. He also directed UNAM's Laboratorio de Creación Musical.

Born Neil Megson in Manchester on 22 February 1950, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge co-founded the COUM Transmissions collective and then Throbbing Gristle in 1975, pioneering industrial music until the band dissolved in 1981. Psychic TV followed, eventually absorbing acid house and evolving through dozens of configurations. With partner Lady Jaye Breyer, they pursued the Pandrogeny Project from 1995: using surgery to physically merge identities into a single pandrogyne. Lady Jaye died in 2007 but P-Orridge continued the project until their own death from leukaemia on 14 March 2020 in New York.

Based in Copenhagen, he holds a PhD examining sound as a relational phenomenon — exploring the conditions of the audible and their social and critical implications — a background that shapes the analytical rigour of his practice. Working across sound composition, installation, and performance, his work often emerges from site- or context-specific research and collaborative dialogue. He has composed for dance and theatre productions and video. His works engage with tensions between physical and imaginary space, exploring how sound articulates thresholds between inside and outside, between visible and invisible, and how phenomena such as rumour function as sonic and social relations.

Yann Leguay lives and works in Brussels. He focuses on the notions of dematerialization, the use of interfaces, and everything about the materiality of memory. In his sound practice, he was defined as a ‘media saboteur’ by the Consumer Waste label, seeking to fold the sound materiality in on itself using basic means in the form of objects, videos, and performances.

He is also involved in different collective projects as sound and music curator, and participates in graphical designs for books and revues.

American criminal and cult leader (1934–2017) who recorded folk and psychedelic music in Los Angeles in the late 1960s and whose songs circulated in underground contexts as documents of countercultural pathology. His friendship with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys led to a reworked version of his song Cease to Exist appearing on their 1969 album 20/20. The album Lie: The Love and Terror Cult was pressed in 1970. Prison recordings made in the 1980s later surfaced as tapes, continuing to circulate in noise and underground music circles.

Born in 1967, this German composer and performer began composing in 1990 after working with Erwin Koch-Raphael and completed his composition diploma at the Bremen University for the Arts under Younghi Pagh-Paan. He has worked at the Archivio Luigi Nono in Venice and as a guest composer at the Institute for Electronic Music in Graz and the Experimentalstudio at SWR. His work explores diverse notational and conceptual frameworks including text scores and extended performance instructions. He received the Kunstpreis Musik of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and co-founded MusicActionEnsemble KLANK.

Tachycardie is a French post-punk and industrial music group releasing on the Un Je Ne Sais Quoi label. Their sound draws from the traditions of French minimal synth and cold wave while extending into more aggressive and fragmented electronic territory. Their recordings are characterised by clipped rhythms, agitated basslines, and an atmosphere of anxious energy that situates them in the contemporary revival of late-1970s and early-1980s industrial and post-punk aesthetics. They are based in France and form part of a wider European underground aligned with the Un Je Ne Sais Quoi label.

Born in Naples in 1959, Elio Martusciello is a self-taught Italian composer and performer whose primary instruments are guitar and computer. He studied photography with Mimmo Jodice and visual art with Carlo Alfano, and has since developed a practice spanning acousmatic composition, live electronics, sound installation, and audiovisual art. He teaches electronic music at the Conservatory of Music in Naples. His collaborative work spans decades and includes sessions with Evan Parker, Alvin Curran, Chris Cutler, and Z'EV, among others. Awards include prizes at the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition, the Luigi Russolo prize, and CIMESP in São Paulo.

Born in 1974, Stefan Roigk is a Berlin-based sound artist and composer who studied fine art with a focus on installative sound art at the Hochschule in Hannover under Professor Ulrich Eller. His practice moves between sound collage, sculpture, installation, performance, and graphic scores, directing fragments of everyday life and ambient atmosphere into dynamic intermedia arrangements. A notable work, TRACES—OF (ausland, Berlin, 2019), constructed a forensic scenario from an acousmatic composition assembled from everyday recordings, whose associations were described by volunteer witnesses and then translated into objects, photographs, and drawings. He also curates concerts at ausland.

Purgist is the project of Polish artist Dawid Kowalski, established in 2013 as a successor to his previous solo endeavour Sleep Sessions (2005–2013). Working within noise, dark ambient, and post-industrial electronic music, his recordings—including Bleak Prospects and Our Temple Is on Fire—draw on urban field recordings, digital artefacts, and aural atmospherics organised around reflections on personal obsession and self-destructive behaviour. Kowalski also founded the online community HarshNoise.org in 2006, which evolved from a web forum into a collective of artists, journalists, and enthusiasts devoted to radical music.

Formed in New York in 1976 by vocalist Lux Interior and guitarist Poison Ivy, who met in Sacramento in 1972, The Cramps built their sound from the most extreme edges of 1950s rockabilly, surf, and garage, filtered through punk and B-movie horror. They were among the first acts to use the term psychobilly and debuted at CBGB alongside the Ramones, Television, and Patti Smith. Their first album Songs the Lord Taught Us appeared in 1980. Interior and Ivy remained the band's only constant members until Interior's death in 2009, when the group dissolved.

Vocalist and cartoonist born in Rome in 1970, now resident in Berlin, active in experimental music since the mid-1980s when he began singing in free-form rock bands. In 1990 he co-founded Burp Enterprise, a multimedia collective originally based in Florence. In 1995 he co-founded Jealousy Party with percussionist Roberta WJM Andreucci and reed player Edoardo Ricci, a Berlin-based unit that fuses improv, noise, avant-rock, and electronic collage. His solo practice deploys voice, microphone, and electronics to produce processed vocal eruptions, pitched mouth-cavity sounds, and sampled fragments within a sound world that moves fluidly between physical intensity and a sharp sense of humor.

CocoRosie is the duo of American sisters Bianca and Sierra Casady, formed in Paris in 2003. Their music combines operatic soprano and lo-fi folk with hip-hop beats, toy instruments, found sounds, and deeply personal lyrical imagery — a collision of the childlike and the traumatic that is difficult to categorise and immediately recognisable. Albums including La Maison de Mon Rêve (2004), Noah's Ark (2005), and Grey Oceans (2010) on Touch and Go and Sub Pop established them as singular voices in independent music. Their visual and performative practice extends their music into costume, circus, and queer performance art contexts.

Born in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1925, he discovered his aptitude for art while serving in the US Marines and went on to study at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he encountered John Cage and Merce Cunningham. His Combines, produced between 1954 and 1964, fused painting and sculpture by incorporating discarded everyday objects — tyres, quilts, stuffed animals — collected from the streets of New York. He won the International Grand Prize in Painting at the Venice Biennale in 1964 and the National Medal of Arts in 1993. He died in 2008, widely regarded as a pivotal bridge between abstract expressionism and pop art.

Born in Mexicali and raised partly in Oakland before returning to Mexico at fifteen, Marco Polo Gutierrez developed his Siete Catorce alias in Tijuana after a 2011 encounter with the city's ruidosón scene — a movement whose dark, hypnotic energy reshaped his earlier output in cumbia and dubstep. His tracks layer tribal guarachero rhythms, pre-Hispanic percussion, and ominous piano motifs into a distinctive northern Mexican electronic sound. His remix of Celso Piña's Cumbia Poder brought him to the attention of the global bass community, and in 2018 he co-founded the SUBREAL label alongside producer Stella Ahn.

Héctor Rey is a noise musician, composer, and visual artist from Bilbao, Basque Country. He began formal music study at age five, growing up in a household where his father — himself a committed music lover — took him to concerts and surrounded him with jazz and classical music. He began recording experimental and noise music in 2006, developing a parallel practice in sculpture. He works as a composer, improviser, and performer of both his own pieces and those of other composers, and is the owner of the Nueni record label.

Murcof is the alias of Fernando Corona, a Mexican electronic musician born in 1970 in Tijuana and based in Barcelona. His music combines classical orchestration and contemporary composition — particularly from the spectralism and post-minimalism traditions — with electronic processing and digital precision. Albums including Martes (2002), Utopía (2004), and Cosmos (2007) on Leaf established him as a distinctive voice within European contemporary electronic music. He has collaborated with Vanessa Wagner on piano and electronics albums, with the duo releasing Statea (2014). His work bridges the concert hall and electronic contexts with unusual fluency.

A Jakarta-based rock trio formed in 2011, consisting of Rey Marshall on guitar and vocals, John Paul Patton on bass and vocals, and I Gusti Viki Vikranta on drums. Their name, meaning Group of Rocket Flyers, is taken from a song by the classic Indonesian band Duo Kribo. Rooted in the heavy psychedelic and hard rock tradition of 1970s Indonesia, they draw from bands like AKA and Panbers as well as Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. Their 2015 debut album Teriakan Bocah, produced by guitarist Didit Saad, was named one of the best Indonesian albums of that year by Rolling Stone Indonesia.

Born Isidor Goldstein in Botoșani, Romania in 1925, Isidore Isou arrived in Paris in 1945 and founded Lettrism the following year, announcing its existence by interrupting a Tristan Tzara premiere at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier. The movement proposed a total reconstruction of language starting from individual letters, extending into poetry, painting, and cinema. His 1951 film Traité de bave et d'éternité caused a scandal at Cannes, introducing what he called discrepant cinema — the deliberate dissociation of sound and image. He continued to write, theorise, and exhibit until his death in Paris in 2007, and is buried at Père-Lachaise.

Bass Communion is the ambient and drone project of British musician Steven Wilson, best known as the founder and principal member of Porcupine Tree. Working under this alias since 1994, Wilson produces recordings very different from his progressive rock practice — long, dark, immersive drone and ambient constructions built from processed guitars, field recordings, and electronics. Albums including Bass Communion I (1995), Ghosts on Magnetic Tape (2004), and Molotov and Haze (2010) document this sustained parallel practice. The project has released on Headphone Dust and other labels and collaborates with acts including Muslimgauze and Peter Christopherson.

Serbian-born musician and composer based in Luxembourg since 2009. She studied accordion with Hugo Noth at the Hochschule für Musik Trossingen and has since performed at the Donaueschinger Musiktage, the 55th Biennale di Venezia, Ring Ring Festival in Belgrade, and Łaznia Centre for Contemporary Art in Poland. Her practice centres on the physical presence of sound, and she composes as well as performs. She collaborates regularly with synthesist Steve Moore, with whom she premiered the suite Event Horizon at Casino Luxembourg.

Detroit electro duo formed by James Stinson (1969–2002) and Gerald Donald, who met at Kettering Senior High School and spent three years refining their sound before debuting with Deep Sea Dweller in 1992. Their music—dancefloor electro dense with retro machine-funk and aquatic textures—was inseparable from a sustained science fiction mythology: Drexciyans were an underwater civilisation descended from enslaved African women thrown overboard during the Middle Passage. Stinson, the conceptual heart of the duo, died in September 2002 of a heart condition. Donald continues under aliases including Dopplereffekt, Arpanet, and Der Zyklus.

Mouse on Mars is a German electronic duo comprising Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma, formed in Düsseldorf in 1993. Their practice merges IDM, drum and bass, noise, and pop into a playful and formally experimental body of work that has remained consistently inventive across three decades. Releasing on Too Pure and then Sonig, albums including Iaora Tahiti (1995), Autoditacker (1997), and Radical Connector (2004) established a sound defined by lush digital glitch, danceable rhythms, and an irreverent approach to genre constraint. They have collaborated widely — with Mark E. Smith of The Fall, Dodo NKishi, and others — and continue to record and perform.

Born on 13 March 1930 in Wendorf and trained under Otto Pankok at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, this German artist became internationally known for nail reliefs that structure light and shadow through dense rhythmic repetition. He joined the ZERO group in 1961 alongside Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, sharing their ambition to give art a fresh start after World War II. Throughout the 1960s he drove nails into furniture, television sets, chairs, and pianos. His Düsseldorf studio, held since 1987, remained his workspace until late in his life. He died on 10 June 2025 at the age of 95.

Keiji Haino (b. 1952, Chiba) is a Japanese musician and vocalist whose output spans rock, free improvisation, noise music, drone, psychedelic music, and minimalism across more than four decades. Inspired initially by Antonin Artaud and redirected toward music by an encounter with The Doors, Haino formed the rock band Fushitsusha in 1978, a group known for its extreme intensity and duration of performance. After a period of retreat from 1983 to 1987, he returned to active performance and has continued working at an extraordinary level of prolificacy ever since.

Born in Mexico City in 1990, Esquinca is a Berlin-based sound researcher whose practice centres on audio electronics at extreme amplification levels, investigating the spatio-temporal relationships produced when technology and sound interact in specific architectural spaces. Most of his works are site-specific compositions and installations designed to expose the resonant potential of a given room. He is a founding member of the Berlin collective Oqko and a PhD researcher at the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Technology in Rotterdam under Yuk Hui. His work has been presented at EMPAC New York, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Berghain, Tresor, and at the Nikola Tesla Museum in Zagreb.

Ariel Kalma (1947–2025) was a French musician and sound explorer working with recorder, saxophone, flute, synthesiser, and tape. After touring with Salvatore Adamo and collaborating with Baden Powell, he flew one-way to India in 1974 to study classical Indian music and develop his practice of drone and circular breathing. He worked as a technician at INA GRM in Paris, pioneering dual reel-to-reel tape loops as a layering system. His albums Le Temps des Moissons (1975) and Osmose (1978, recorded in Borneo) are central works. A 2014 retrospective on RVNG Intl. introduced him to a new generation.

Born David Michael Bunting on 5 March 1960 in Batu Gajah, Malaysia, to British parents, he is best known as the founder and sole constant member of Current 93, formed in London in 1983 after he left Psychic TV. Beginning with harsh industrial noise, Current 93 shifted in the mid-1980s toward a devotional neofolk sound shaped by Tibet's mysticism—drawing on Vajrayana Buddhism, Christian eschatology, and Thelema. His apocalyptic imagery of childhood, loss, and end-times has made Current 93 one of the most singular projects in British experimental music. In 2009 he completed an MA in Coptic Language and Grammar through Macquarie University.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor is a Montreal-based collective of nine musicians, formed in 1994. Working without vocals, they build extended orchestral rock compositions from strings, guitars, brass, and drums, structured around long arcs of tension and release that draw equally on post-rock, drone, and experimental film score traditions. F♯ A♯ ∞ (1997) and Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven (2000) are landmark records of the post-rock genre. Consistently aligned with anarchist and anti-capitalist politics, they went on extended hiatus from 2003 to 2010 and have since maintained an active recording and touring practice, releasing several albums on Constellation Records.

Ursula Bogner (presented as 1946–1994) is a figure whose documentary status has been deliberately left ambiguous by the German musician and producer Jan Jelinek, who released her recordings posthumously on his Faitiche label in 2008 under the title Sowieso. The release was presented as the work of an amateur electronic musician — a pharmacist who had recorded experimental electronic music in her private studio from the 1970s to the early 1990s — and was accompanied by biographical materials and photographs that established a compelling and apparently plausible personal history.

James Hoff is an American artist and musician based in New York whose work addresses the intersection of computer viruses, network protocols, and cultural production. His Blaster series transformed computer viruses into musical compositions. He has released on PAN and co-founded Primary Information, an important publisher of artists' books. His practice interrogates how digital systems produce and transform culture. As a publisher he has made available important historical documents of conceptual and performance art. His dual practice as artist and publisher demonstrates unusual breadth.

Trevor Paglen (b. 1974, Camp Springs, Maryland) is an American artist and geographer whose work investigates state secrecy, surveillance, and the hidden landscapes of military and intelligence infrastructure. He holds a PhD in geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and brings a rigorous spatial and methodological approach to his investigations of black sites, drone bases, spy satellites, and undersea data cables.

His photographic work — made with extreme telephoto lenses to document classified military facilities from public land — produces images that are simultaneously documentary and aesthetically compelling.

Viennese artist and writer (1940–2014) who, after breaking off studies in political science and Slavic studies, served in the French Foreign Legion before travelling through France, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and India in the early 1960s. From the mid-1960s his work was shaped by exchanges with the Vienna Group—H.C. Artmann, Gerhard Rühm, Konrad Bayer, and Oswald Wiener—and a lasting friendship with Dieter Roth. His practice, which emerged fully in the 1970s, encompasses drawings, material pictures, prints, audio cassettes, and videos, centred on language as a system of signs in interaction with image, form, and sound. In 2004 he received Austria's Würdigungspreis für Literatur.

Alan Licht is an American guitarist, composer, and writer based in New York whose work engages with drone, noise, rock, and sound installation. Associated with the New York experimental music scene since the early 1990s, he has released records on labels including Table of the Elements and Drag City that develop a guitar practice indebted to La Monte Young and Rhys Chatham while keeping its own distinctive voice. His installations extend this interest in sustained tone into spatial experience. As a writer, his book Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories (2007) is an influential survey tracing experimental music and visual art through dozens of artists and works.

Formed in London in 1970 by singer and keyboardist Bryan Ferry alongside bassist Graham Simpson, the group expanded to include Andy Mackay on saxophone, Phil Manzanera on guitar, Paul Thompson on drums, and Brian Eno on synthesizer before recording their 1972 debut. Eno departed in 1973, replaced by Eddie Jobson. Their sound fused glam theatricality, experimental musicianship, arch humour, and world-weary romanticism into a style that profoundly influenced punk, new wave, and art rock. They released eight studio albums between 1972 and 1982 before disbanding in 1983. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019.

Jan St. Werner (b. 1969) is a German electronic musician, one half of Mouse on Mars alongside Andi Toma, and an extensive solo practitioner. Mouse on Mars, formed in Düsseldorf in 1993, developed a distinctive electronic music combining the rhythmic structures of techno and drum and bass with experimental composition and a playful approach to genre. Albums including Iaora Tahiti (1995) and Niun Niggung (1999) established them as central figures in European electronic music. Werner's solo work, released under the Fiepblatter Catalogue imprint, extends this practice into more radical territory, exploring modular and granular synthesis, spectral composition, and feedback.

Sepultura are a Brazilian heavy metal band formed in Belo Horizonte in 1984 by brothers Max and Igor Cavalera, whose work from the early 1990s brought Brazilian metal to global attention. Their albums Beneath the Remains (1989) and Arise (1991) established them within thrash metal, but Chaos A.D. (1993) and Roots (1996) defined their key contribution: integrating indigenous Brazilian percussion, Afro-Brazilian rhythms, and tribal instrumentation with extreme metal. Roots—recorded partly with the Xavante people of Mato Grosso—became one of the most influential metal albums of the decade, shaping the emerging nu metal movement while bringing wider attention to the Xavante themselves.

Joji Yuasa (1929–2022) was a Japanese composer and a founding member of the Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop) collective in postwar Tokyo. Without formal conservatoire training, he developed an independent compositional language that drew on musique concrète, graphic notation, and electroacoustic methods. His works — including Chronoplastic (1972) and Projection for String Orchestra (1967) — are among the most significant of the Japanese postwar experimental tradition. He taught for many years at the University of California, San Diego, and maintained productive dialogue with both Japanese and Western experimental traditions throughout a long and prolific career.

The Cherry Point is the alias of Phil Blankenship, an American noise artist based in San Francisco. Working in power electronics and harsh noise, he has released extensively on Hospital Productions, American Tapes, and other noise underground labels since the early 2000s. His approach deploys maximal sound pressure, distortion, and abrasive electronic texture in the tradition of American power electronics. He has collaborated with Aaron Dilloway and other figures in the Midwestern and West Coast noise underground, and his label work has been a significant part of the American experimental distribution network.

Born in Leeds in 1946, Trevor Wishart is a British composer and theorist whose electroacoustic work centres on the transformation of the human voice and the sonic potential of real-world sound. His Vox Cycle, six compositions created between 1979 and 1988, is a landmark of extended vocal technique in electronic music, building on his earlier work Red Bird (1977–78). In 1986 he co-founded the Composers Desktop Project, one of the first digital signal-processing software suites developed for domestic use. His books On Sonic Art (1985, revised 1996) and Audible Design remain foundational texts in the field, and he was awarded the Giga-Herz Grand Prize in 2008.

A Jakarta-based duo formed in early 2014 by music producer and lecturer Kimo Rizky and vocalist Kallula Harsynta Esterlita, their name combining their first names after social media constraints prevented the use of an ampersand. Kimo produces disco-inflected electronic tracks while Kallula contributes vocals, and together they draw from psychedelic, nu-wave, dub, electronic, and pop without settling into a single genre. Their debut single Under Your Spell appeared in May 2014. Their album O, released in 2022, represents their most recent full-length statement of an evolving sound built from layered electronic textures and melodic mood.

Cristian Vogel (born 1972) is a British-Chilean electronic musician and producer based in Berlin. Releasing on Tresor, Novamute, and his own Mosquito label, he developed from the mid-1990s a style of technically precise and formally experimental techno that placed him alongside Thomas Brinkmann and Surgeon in the harder, more conceptual edge of British and European dance music. His work has consistently engaged with process, system, and machine logic rather than traditional musical structure. He has collaborated with Jamie Lidell and Steve Bicknell, and continues to produce and perform internationally.

Dutch DJ, producer, and radio host Marcelle van Hoof has been active since the punk era of 1977, driven by an unrelenting passion for underground music. Performing on three turntables simultaneously, she blends dub, experimental electronics, post-punk, industrial techno, African vocals, Syrian beats, and global sounds into freewheeling, rhythmically intricate sets that prioritise improvisation and wit. Her vinyl collection numbers over 20,000 records. She broadcasts the weekly show Another Nice Mess on DFM and has been appointed lifetime resident DJ at Uganda's Nyege Nyege Music Festival. Often compared to John Peel for her breadth of curation and commitment to the underground.

Founded in Slovenia in 1984 while the country was still part of Yugoslavia, Neue Slowenische Kunst comprises the music group Laibach, the painting collective IRWIN, and the Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre. Its core artistic strategy — termed the retro principle — involves the ironic redeployment of avant-garde forms and totalitarian iconography to dissect ideology, nationalism, and cultural identity. Laibach's name, the German word for Ljubljana, was deliberately provocative. In 1992 NSK declared itself the NSK State in Time, a borderless entity with no territory that issues passports to non-territorial citizens worldwide.

Burial is the alias of William Bevan, a London-based producer whose identity remained anonymous for years after his emergence on Hyperdub Records in 2006. His self-titled debut and the landmark album Untrue (2007) constructed a sound from fragmented garage rhythms, pitch-shifted vocal samples, rain and urban field recordings, and an overwhelming atmosphere of late-night solitude and grief. Untrue is widely regarded as one of the defining records of the 2000s, credited with shaping the aesthetic trajectory of UK bass music, hauntology, and ambient electronic music for the following decade. He continues to release sporadically on Hyperdub, typically through limited-edition EPs and singles.

Born in Los Angeles in 1912, he studied briefly at Pomona College and later with Arnold Schoenberg at UCLA. Through engagement with Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s he developed a practice of chance composition, using the I Ching to make musical decisions and remove personal taste from the creative process. His 1952 work 4'33", in which performers produce no deliberate sound for the duration specified, proposed that listening itself was the primary act of music. He pioneered the prepared piano, invented the happening, and his writings in Silence (1961) became foundational texts of the postwar avant-garde. He died in New York in August 1992.

Born David Robert Jones in Brixton, London, on 8 January 1947, he adopted the Bowie surname to avoid confusion with Davy Jones of The Monkees and became one of the most influential and constantly reinventing figures in popular music history. His run of personae—from the glam rock of Ziggy Stardust (1972) through the ambient experimentalism of the Berlin trilogy Low, Heroes, and Lodger (1977–79), made in collaboration with Brian Eno—reshaped how rock could engage with art, identity, and electronic sound. He continued to release albums until Blackstar, issued two days before his death on 10 January 2016.

Thomas Schafer (b. 1967, Hamburg) is a writer, dramaturge, and curator working in contemporary music. He studied musicology, literature, and philosophy in Hamburg, completing a doctorate at Humboldt University Berlin, and co-founded a research group on music written in exile.

From 2000 to 2007 he served as dramaturge for contemporary music at the Vienna Konzerthaus, overseeing the Wien Modern and Horgange festivals and the generator concert series. Since 2009 he has directed the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt and the Darmstadt Summer Course, a central institution for new music since the 1940s.

Lucrecia Martel is an Argentine film director, screenwriter, and producer, born on December 14, 1966, in Salta, Argentina. Considered one of Latin America's leading auteurs, she studied at the Avellaneda Experimental film school and ENERC in Buenos Aires. Her feature films — La Ciénaga (2001), La niña santa (2004), La mujer sin cabeza (2008), and Zama (2017) — have been presented at Cannes, Venice, Berlin, and Toronto, establishing her as a major figure in contemporary world cinema.

Based in Milan, Alessandro Brivio is an Italian sound artist and experimental musician whose work centers on aggressive loop construction, African field recordings, and sounds drawn from photographic equipment. His compositions are characterised by complex, obsessive rhythmic tracks reflecting a sustained engagement with African aesthetics. In more recent work he has explored extreme approaches to sound processing, diffusion, and re-composition using compressed air, percussion, piano, and samples. He is closely associated with the Milan-based label Senufo Editions, founded by Giuseppe Ielasi, releasing records including 6pezzi2009+lagodelnulla and Associazioni Poro.

Formed in France in the 1970s by Fabrice Cuitad and Yves Hayat, The Droids fused electronic disco with early synthesizer sequencing on their sole album Star Peace, released on the Barclay label in 1978. Their single (Do You Have) The Force drew on Kraftwerk, Giorgio Moroder, and Jean-Michel Jarre. Short-lived but influential, The Droids are now recognised as a formative step in the evolution of French electronic music, their masked stage presence and machinic aesthetic anticipating the strand of the genre that would later surface in Daft Punk.

Tirzah is a British musician and vocalist born in London. Working closely with producer and childhood friend Mica Levi, she makes intimate, fractured R&B and electronic music. Her debut album Devotion (2018) on Domino Records received wide critical recognition for its spare, disorienting approach to pop song forms. A second album, Colourgrade (2021), continued with greater abstraction. Her voice and Levi's production are inseparable elements of a shared aesthetic, and their collaboration extends across live performance and visual contexts. Basic Need is among the most emotionally concentrated tracks on Devotion.

Born in Viseu in 1976 and based in Lisbon, she is a Portuguese sound artist, filmmaker, and curator whose practice investigates the sonic dimensions of urban and ecological environments. Her documentary Soundwalkers (2008) gathered perspectives on sound from artists, musicians, physicians, and theorists, screening at the Subtropics Festival in Miami and at international sound art events. She is founder and director of the Lisboa Soa environmental sound art festival and the Invisible Places symposium, and in 2022 established Sonora, an association developing transdisciplinary projects at the intersection of art, science, ecology, and sound.

Born in Narbonne, France in 1984, Félix Blume studied sound in Toulouse and at the INSAS in Brussels before settling into a practice split between Mexico and the French countryside. Over more than two decades he has worked extensively across Latin America, documenting sonic environments in collaboration with local communities and using public space as a site for experimentation. His project Los Gritos de México, built from the shouts of street vendors, won the Pierre Schaeffer prize at Phonurgia Nova in Paris and an honourable mention at the Bienal de Radio in Mexico City. His work spans sound pieces, video, and installation.

Juanjosé Rivas (b. 1976, Mexico) is a Mexico City-based sound and visual artist, cultural manager, and educator. He studied visual arts at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado (La Esmeralda) in Mexico City. His practice uses sound art, performance, sculpture, drawing, photography, and installation — without formal training in classical music, he approaches sound experimentation as a sculptural process, treating listening environments as material. Error, obstruction, and translation failure between artistic languages are central to his methodology. He hosts the VOLTA concert series in Mexico City.

Ikävä Pii is a Finnish experimental group whose name translates approximately as "boring point" or "nostalgic point" in Finnish. Their work combines improvisation, electronic processing, and free music in a practice connected to the Finnish experimental underground. Releasing on Finnish labels and in DIY formats, they engage with the landscape of Finnish experimental and noise music that includes figures such as Olli Aarni and the broader Hiljaiset Levyt community. Their music is characterised by a dry, reductive approach to sound-making that reflects specifically Northern European sensibilities.

Beatrice Dillon is a London-based musician and composer working at the intersection of club music, contemporary composition, and electronic sound design. Her album Workaround (2020) on PAN drew on influences ranging from footwork and percussion music to Steve Reich and Eliane Radigue, assembling a body of work with unusual structural rigour and rhythmic intelligence. She has collaborated with Rupert Clervaux (Workaround also features his contributions), Lawrence, and Coti K., and has performed and presented work internationally. Her practice moves freely between DJ sets, live electronic performance, and commissioned composition for dance and other contexts.

The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU, sometimes typeset Ccru) was an experimental cultural theorist collective formed in late 1995 at the University of Warwick in England, gradually separating from academic institutions until it dissolved in the early 2000s. It developed a reputation for its idiosyncratic theory-fiction — texts incorporating philosophy, cyberpunk aesthetics, numerology, and occultism into a deliberately destabilizing form.

Its leading figures included Sadie Plant, Mark Fisher, and Nick Land, alongside a rotating cast of graduate students and collaborators.

Based in Berlin and London, he is a field recordist, musician, and researcher active in experimental music since the 1970s. A founding member of the London Musicians' Collective, he played in the avant-garde quartet Alterations alongside Steve Beresford, David Toop, and Terry Day from 1978 to 1986. His long-running project Sounds From Dangerous Places collects field recordings from sites of major environmental damage — including Chernobyl and the Caspian oil fields — as a form of sonic journalism. Since 1998 he has also run the Favourite Sounds Project, mapping what people find meaningful in the soundscapes of their cities.

Dana Montana is a DJ and producer born in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, and based in Antwerp, Belgium. Raised on a diet of classical music from her mother and grandmother (both music teachers), Ukrainian pop, and jazz — Benny Goodman was a particular favourite — she found her direction when she discovered Antwerp's club scene and the underground LGBT community gathered around Ampere's Drag Me to Hell nights. During the COVID-19 lockdowns she deepened her relationship with DJing and electronic production, and by the summer of 2021 she was performing regularly across Europe.

The Space Lady is the alias of Susan Dietrich Schneider, an American busker and performer who performed in San Francisco and Boston from the late 1970s through the 2000s. Wearing a winged helmet and flowing robes, she covered rock and pop songs on a Casio keyboard with a wah-wah pedal, developing a naive, otherworldly sound that attracted a devoted following. Her Greatest Hits (2014, Sacred Bones) compiled recordings made from audience tapes and drew widespread attention, belatedly recognising her as a unique practitioner of outsider and lo-fi electronic folk. She continues to perform occasionally.

Born Brian Imanuel Soewarno in Jakarta in 1999, he taught himself English and hip-hop through YouTube before going viral in 2016 with Dat $tick, a lo-fi rap track that attracted reaction videos from prominent US artists. He signed to Asian-American label 88rising that year and in 2018 released his debut album Amen, largely self-produced. Originally performing as Rich Chigga, he adopted the name Rich Brian in January 2018. His subsequent work, including the album WHERE IS MY HEAD?, further established him as a leading figure in the international profile of Indonesian and Asian hip-hop.

Piero Heliczer (1937–1993) was an Italian-American poet, publisher and underground filmmaker. Born in Rome and raised in New York, he was a child actor in Italian cinema before becoming a central figure in the 1960s New York underground, closely associated with Andy Warhol's Factory, Jack Smith, Angus MacLise, Gerard Malanga and the early Velvet Underground — who performed at his earliest multimedia film events, before their association with Warhol, in 1965.

He founded the Dead Language Press in New York, publishing work by Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg and other Beat and post-Beat writers in handmade editions.

Populäre Mechanik is a German experimental group formed in the early 1980s in Hamburg, associated with the broader Geniale Dilletanten (Brilliant Dilettantes) movement — the West German avant-garde scene that also produced Einstürzende Neubauten, Die Tödliche Doris, Malaria!, Der Plan and others, and that briefly made Berlin and Hamburg into centres of a productive musical amateurism.

Their work combined deliberately crude instrumental technique, ironic pop gestures, avant-garde composition and political commentary in a spirit of productive amateurism that explicitly rejected professional musical conventions.

Vagina Dentata Organ is the project of Jordi Valls, a Spanish-born artist based in various European locations. Working in power electronics, body music, and noise since the late 1970s, his practice is explicitly confrontational and transgressive — drawing on de Sade, body horror, sexuality, and institutional violence in recordings and performances designed to disturb and destabilise. Releases on Subculture, Dossier, and other labels throughout the 1980s and 1990s place him in the first generation of European power electronics alongside Whitehouse and Schloss Tegal. His work has been praised and condemned for its uncompromising extremity.

Kristin Oppenheim is an American artist working primarily with voice, sound, and audio installation. Her work uses looped and layered recordings of her own voice — often singing pop songs, lullabies, or fragments of memory — to create immersive spatial experiences in gallery contexts. She has exhibited at major institutions including the Guggenheim Museum, the Kunsthalle Basel, and MoMA, and her work is held in significant public collections. The repetition and spatial qualities of her installations draw from minimal art traditions while maintaining an emotional and autobiographical charge derived from the material of everyday song.

Diamanda Galás is a Greek-American avant-garde composer and performer whose confrontational work — combining extreme vocal technique, political urgency, and spiritual intensity — has made her one of the most significant and uncompromising artists in experimental music. She rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with the trilogy Masque of the Red Death and the performance work Plague Mass, which directly addressed the AIDS crisis with a ferocity that matched the political silence and inaction surrounding it.

The Velvet Underground and Nico refers to the 1967 debut album by The Velvet Underground — Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker — featuring German vocalist Nico and produced under the patronage of Andy Warhol. Released on Verve Records with Warhol's banana design, the record contained both avant-garde noise experiments and uncommonly literary rock songs dealing with heroin, sadomasochism, and alienation. It sold modestly on release but became one of the most influential recordings in rock history, cited by generations of punk, post-punk, and art-rock musicians.

Techno Animal was a British industrial hip-hop and experimental electronic duo comprising Kevin Martin and Justin Broadrick (of Godflesh and Jesu). Active primarily in the 1990s, they produced a sound of extreme bass pressure, mutated hip-hop rhythms, and industrial density — an encounter between Mick Harris's post-Scorn dub and the hardcore electronic aesthetics of Broadrick's other projects. Releases on Virgin-subsidiary Interscope and their own label explored a ferocious intersection of hip-hop, metal, and noise. Martin has continued similar work as The Bug; Broadrick has pursued numerous projects including Jesu and his numerous collaborations in the post-metal/ambient space.

Audio Gruppe / Audio Scene 79 was a German experimental audio collective active in the late 1970s, associated with the wave of industrial, electronic, and sound experimentation that characterized the German underground of that period. Working within the productive context of post-punk and industrial innovation, the group produced music that engaged with electronic sound, tape manipulation, and the sonic possibilities opened up by the convergence of rock instrumentation with experimental electronics.

O Yuki Conjugate is a British experimental group formed in Nottingham in 1982 by Roger Horberry and Andrew Hulme. Their early cassette releases on Midnight Music blended 4AD-influenced atmospherics, tribal percussion, and environmental sound into a distinctive form of avant-garde ambient that pre-figured later developments in world-inflected electronic music. Albums including Equator (1986) and Peyote (1989) developed an immersive, often unsettling sonic world that sits outside conventional genre categories. Reissues have introduced their work to listeners in the context of revived interest in experimental 1980s UK music.

Hee Ju Im is a South Korean sound and installation artist whose practice works with found objects, motors, and electronic modules to create sound environments grounded in the concept of the abject — drawing on Julia Kristeva's framework to explore the intersection of sound, matter, and technology that operates outside normative function. She has received support from Arts Council Korea and Art Center Nabi in South Korea, and has presented work in international experimental sound and installation contexts since the early 2020s.

Mark Solotroff is an American noise and industrial artist based in Chicago, active since the late 1980s. His primary project, Bloodyminded — formed with Brian Nervous — operates within the tradition of American power electronics and industrial noise, combining harsh electronics with confrontational imagery and text in works occupying the territory between formal experimentation and aggression. His parallel project Anatomy of Habit integrates post-rock, doom metal, and industrial composition into a more textural practice. As a label operator — through Bloodlust!, founded in 1994 — and promoter since the late 1980s, Solotroff remains a sustaining presence in Chicago's noise scene.

Max Eilbacher is a Baltimore-based intermedia artist and computer musician. His work draws on electroacoustic composition, American noise, modular synthesis, generative computer programs, field recordings, and found sounds. He plays bass and electronics in the avant-rock quartet Horse Lords — known for just intonation and algorithmic composition — and has collaborated with Matmos. Solo releases include Schizophrenia as Architecture (NNA Tapes, 2016), Dual Monologues in Parallel (Mondoj, 2017), Here a Peak, There an Abyss (Anòmia, 2020), VL #5 'Beamforming a Temporary City' (2021), and MAX EILBACHER (Ultraviolet Light, 2023). He previously played in Teeth Mountain.

Vica Pacheco was born in Oaxaca, Mexico in 1993. She lives and works in Brussels. Pacheco studied Fine Arts at La Esmeralda in Mexico City before graduating from Villa Arson in France in 2017. Her practice is rooted in experimental music and composition, but she also has a practice in ceramics and 3d animation. Her work is above all eclectic and energetic, inspired by mythological crossbreeding, prehispanic technologies, and syncretism; she likes to arrange the most heterogeneous or hazardous elements between them, to produce sound performances and installations.

Die Tödliche Doris was a performance art and music group based in West Berlin from 1980 to 1987, founded by Wolfgang Müller and Nikolaus Utermöhlen. Part of the Geniale Dilletanten (Brilliant Dilettantes) movement that also included Einstürzende Neubauten and Malaria!, their approach was deliberately anti-stylistic — in opposition to any coherent aesthetic position or technical mastery — informed by the post-structuralist theory of Baudrillard, Foucault, and Guattari.

Their recordings and performances were exercises in productive incompetence, appropriation, and conceptual play, producing music, film, and visual work that refused the conventions of any single medium.

Deena Abdelwahed is a Tunisian DJ, producer, and artist based in Tunis and Paris. Working at the intersection of club music, noise, and North African traditions, her productions draw on dakka, gnawa, and chaabi rhythms while deploying distorted bass weights and abrasive textures. Her debut album Khonnar (2018) on InFiné was one of the most critically noted records of that year, praised for its political energy and sonic originality. A frequent performer at Berghain and CTM, she is a key voice in a generation rethinking the relationship between Arabic musical heritage and contemporary electronic music.

Olli Aarni is a Finnish musician and artist based in Helsinki. His recordings work with the meeting points of acoustic instruments, tape, field recordings, and minimal electronics, producing music of quiet intensity and spatial depth. He releases primarily on the Hiljaiset Levyt label, his own imprint dedicated to music that inhabits silence and the borders of perception. Albums including Järvi (2017) and Nuo (2019) document a practice attuned to the Finnish landscape and a carefully developed vocabulary of textural minimalism. He is part of an active Helsinki experimental music community and performs regularly.

Paul Nicholson is a musician and artist working in experimental and electronic music.

William Bennett (b. 1955) is a British musician, founder of Whitehouse and Cut Hands, and one of the central and most controversial figures in power electronics and noise music since 1980. Whitehouse, which he founded in that year, is credited as one of the defining acts of power electronics — a form characterized by extreme volume, synthesizer aggression, and deliberately provocative lyrical content.

Under the Whitehouse name, Bennett produced dozens of records — for Come Org, Susan Lawly, and other labels — that explored violence, sexuality, and transgression with unsparing directness.

Erick Diego is a radio host, DJ, performer, and curator whose practice spans broadcasting, live sets, and the organisation of experimental music events. He hosts Blue Monday, a regular Monday programme using the radio format as a space for curatorial thinking and the presentation of music that sits outside commercial channels. His work connects the roles of DJ and curator — approaching selection and sequencing as acts of editorial and performative significance rather than purely functional ones. He is active within the experimental and independent music communities that form around radio and live performance contexts.

Jason Kahn is an American musician, sound artist, and visual artist based in Zürich. Working since the 1990s as a drummer and percussionist in improvised and free jazz contexts, he subsequently developed a practice of electroacoustic improvisation, installation, and synthesis. He founded the Cut label in Zürich to release his own work and that of others engaged in experimental music and sound art. His performances and recordings explore resonance, space, and duration through sine waves, acoustic percussion, and electronic processing. He has collaborated with Toshiya Tsunoda, Sachiko M, and many others, and has taught and performed internationally.

Asa-Chang & Junray is a Japanese group founded by percussionist ASA-CHANG, who was previously the founder of Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra. After leaving that group in 1993, he formed ASA-CHANG & Junray in 1998 with programmer and guitarist Hidehiko Urayama, later joined by tabla player U-zhaan in 2000. Their live performances use a portable sound system called Jun-Ray Tronics — also a pun on pilgrimage in Japanese — which produces their characteristic dense, ritualistic sound. Their 2001 EP Hana is regarded as a landmark of Japanese avant-pop and was reissued in a 20th anniversary edition in 2022.

Otto Sidharta is an Indonesian Composer known for his electronic music since the early seventies. Otto Sidharta finished his post-graduate study in composition and electronic music at the Sweelinck Conservatorium in Amsterdam under the guidance of Professor Ton de Leeuw.

Sidharta’s interest in using environmental sounds to express his musical ideas developed when he was a student at the Jakarta Institute of Arts (Institut Kesenian Jakarta). He performed his first electronic music piece, Kemelut, based on water sounds in the First Indonesian Young Composer Festival (Pekan Komponis Indonesia) in 1979.

Barasuara is an Indonesian indie folk-rock band formed in Jakarta in 2012 by vocalist and guitarist Iga Massardi, alongside vocalists Puti Chitara and Asteriska, guitarist TJ Kusuma, bassist Gerald Situmorang, and drummer Marco Steffiano. They made their live debut in June 2014.

Their debut album Taifun (2015) won the AMI Award for Best Alternative Production Work. Sophomore record Pikiran dan Perjalanan followed in 2019. Their third album Jalaran Sadrah (2024), featuring orchestral arrangements by Erwin Gutawa, tackles mortality, disinformation and disillusionment across a broader musical palette.

Rolf Julius (1939–2011) was a German sound artist born in Wilhelmshaven, based in Berlin. He coined the term "small music" to describe his practice: quiet, carefully placed sounds emerging from small speakers embedded in materials — pigment, stones, sand, bowls of water, glass — arranged in intimate configurations that require close physical proximity and sustained attention from the viewer-listener.

His installations distribute delicate acoustic events across architectural and natural spaces, placing the listener in a state of attentiveness to sounds that would otherwise be inaudible or overlooked.

Born in Vienna in 1970, Arnold Haberl studied cello and mathematics before developing a practice under the alias noid that spans cello improvisation, sound installation, video art, and ensemble composition. His playing is built on extreme extended technique: high-pressure bowing, pizzicato frailing, and rapid string concussion produce results ranging from crackling percussion to ghostly high-register cries. He teaches MultiMediaArt at the University for Applied Sciences in Salzburg and has collaborated with Klaus Filip, Dieb13, Billy Roisz, Franz Hautzinger, and Elisabeth Schimana.

Yannick Franck is a Belgian sound artist, composer, and curator whose work spans electroacoustic composition, experimental electronics, sound poetry, and audiovisual environments. Drawing on themes of ritual, mythology, memory, and altered states, he creates densely layered sonic worlds blurring the line between music, performance, and installation. Franck is the founder of Brussels-based label Idiosyncratics, an outlet for experimental and underground sound practices. His projects combine voice, field recordings, analog and digital processing, and collaborative research. Through recordings and curatorial activities, he has built a practice centered on listening as transformative experience.

Moniek Darge is a Belgian violinist, composer and sound artist born in 1952 in Ghent. She is a long-standing member and co-director of the Logos Foundation in Ghent — Belgium's principal centre for experimental and electroacoustic music, founded by Godfried-Willem Raes in 1968 — where she has performed, taught and curated for decades.

Her work spans three interconnected strands: violin improvisation with live electronic processing; "soundscape" compositions, radiophonic works built from field recordings gathered during extensive travels in Bolivia, Australia, Japan, Indonesia and elsewhere; and site-specific installation.

Current 93 is an English experimental group founded in 1982 by David Tibet, born David Michael Bunting in 1960 in Batu Gajah, Malaysia. Initially aligned with the industrial music scene, working with Psychic TV and 23 Skiddoo, Tibet steered the project toward what he termed apocalyptic folk by the mid-1980s, combining acoustic instrumentation, tape manipulation and densely allusive lyrics drawn from Christian mysticism, esoteric thought and eschatological imagery. Tibet has been the sole constant member across a shifting cast of collaborators including Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound, and the group remains a central reference in neofolk and occult-influenced experimental music.

Vatican Shadow is the project of American musician Dominick Fernow, also known as Prurient, based in New York. Working under this alias from around 2011, Fernow produces dense, hypnotic techno and industrial club music that draws on post-9/11 geopolitics, war imagery, and Middle Eastern iconography for its visual and conceptual framework. Releases on Hospital Productions and other labels have been prolific, often arriving as cassettes, vinyl, and digital editions. The project operates at the intersection of dance music infrastructure and noise provocation.

DJ Fitness is an experimental DJ and sound artist working in club music and electronic sound. Active in underground DJ culture, their practice develops between functional dance music and more experimental approaches to mixing, sound design, and the politics of the dancefloor. Their work participates in a contemporary generation of DJs who treat the DJ set as a compositional and curatorial practice rather than mere entertainment.

Toshiro Mayuzumi (1929–1997) was a Japanese composer born in Yokohama who studied composition at the Tokyo Music School and later at the Paris Conservatoire, where he encountered serial and electronic music techniques that would shape his subsequent work. He was one of the most internationally engaged Japanese composers of the postwar period, actively participating in the European new music scene while maintaining a deep engagement with Japanese musical traditions.

In 1964, he began planning and presenting the long-running Japanese television series Daimei no nai ongakukai (Untitled Concerts), which introduced Japanese audiences to experimental and contemporary music.

Virgin Prunes were an Irish post-punk and gothic rock band formed in Dublin in 1977, closely connected to U2 through shared members and the north Dublin commune Lypton Village. While U2 pursued mainstream success, Virgin Prunes — featuring vocalists Gavin Friday and Guggi alongside guitarist Dik Evans, brother of U2's The Edge — developed a theatrical and confrontational practice drawing on performance art, gender transgression, and provocation. Their 1982 debut album ...If I Die, I Die was produced by Colin Newman of Wire, and their catalogue was remastered and reissued on Mute Records in 2004.

Based in Paris and active since the late 1990s, Arnaud Rivière is an electroacoustic musician, free improviser, instrument designer, and sound installation artist. He performs on a DIY device built around a repaired turntable pick-up, combined with a prepared mixer and other handmade tools. In 2003 he co-founded the Sonic Protest festival with Benoît Sonette and Franq de Quengo; the annual event, dedicated to experimental rock, electroacoustic music, improvisation, and noise, grew from Paris to encompass five French cities by 2012. He is also a member of the ONCEIM ensemble and has released recordings on the Eg0cide label.

Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo (born 1992, Medellín, Colombia) is a Colombian film director and sound artist. Daughter of filmmaker Víctor Gaviria, she moved to Buenos Aires to study cinematographic direction at FUC, where she later became a professor of sound. Her short films include Polvo de Barro (2013) and Silencio antes (2016), and her first feature Como el cielo después de llover premiered at Visions du Réel in 2020. She has won Best Sound awards at BAFICI and runs Atalante, a sound post-production studio.

Tujiko Noriko is a Japanese musician and artist born in 1975 in Osaka, now based in Paris. She releases music of intimate electronic composition, breathy Japanese vocals, and a distinctive melancholy that has made her one of the most individual voices in the Mego label catalogue. Albums including Shojo Toshi (2002), Make Me Hard (2003), and Koko (2005) present a personal world of lo-fi electronics and song that resists easy categorisation. She also writes, makes films, and creates visual art. Her long-running relationship with Editions Mego defines her catalogue, and she continues to perform and create internationally.

Sculpture is a British audiovisual duo consisting of Dan Hayhurst (sound and electronics) and Reuben Sutherland (video and visual design), based in London and Brighton. Since 2005 they have developed a distinctive audiovisual practice built around two interconnected inventions: the zoetropic picture disc — a vinyl record with printed imagery that animates under stroboscopic light as it spins — and a live performance method combining rapid-cut video collage with tape-loop electronics and live mixing.

Wire are a British post-punk group formed in London in 1976, whose first three albums — Pink Flag (1977), Chairs Missing (1978), and 154 (1979) — are considered foundational texts of punk, post-punk, and minimalist rock. The band stripped rock to its most essential elements with a programmatic rigor that distinguished them from virtually all their contemporaries: short songs, few notes, radical economy of means.

Pink Flag contains twenty-one songs in under thirty-six minutes, many lasting under a minute, anticipating hardcore punk while remaining entirely their own invention.

Bryan Eubanks (b. 1977, eastern Washington State, US) is a musician working with soprano saxophone, self-designed electronics, and computer music, based in Berlin. Trained first in photography before becoming musically active in Portland, Oregon in the late 1990s, he is largely self-taught as a musician, though he holds an MFA (2012). He has been publicly active since around 2001, presenting work internationally across improvisation, composed electroacoustic works for small ensembles, electronics, and sound installation. His practice is rooted in electroacoustic improvisation (EAI) and reductionism, working at the quieter, more granular edges of sound.

Born in 1975 and based in Lausanne, Switzerland, Francisco Meirino has been active in sound and performance since 1994, releasing early work under the name Phroq until 2009. His practice centres on the failure of programmable systems: working with computer, eurorack synthesizer, reel-to-reel tape recorders, magnetic field detectors, and piezo transducers, he draws out electrostatic noise, hiss, and the terminal sounds of ageing electronics. He won the Swiss Art Council composition prize for experimental music in 2003, and has performed over 150 times in Europe, Japan, and North America. Collaborators have included Jérôme Noetinger and artists across the international noise community.

The project name of Japanese noise artist Kazumoto Endo, whose work under this alias began in 1994 with self-released cassette demos before appearing on labels including Noise, Releasing Eskimo, Self Abuse Records, and Mother Savage Noise Productions throughout 1995. Working within harsh noise, Endo developed a practice oriented toward rethinking how the genre communicates, generating new perspectives in a field that can quickly calcify. He has been cited by peers as an artist who genuinely shifted the terms of noise music. In December 2024, the Berlin label Total Black issued Beyond The Valley Of The Tapes, a two-CD retrospective compilation of his Killer Bug recordings.

Spanish conductor and composer born in Valencia who has been based in Mexico since 1997. He studied in Spain before specialising in twentieth-century repertoire in Salzburg, Luxembourg, and Paris, and is now regarded as one of the leading promoters of contemporary music in Mexico. He has served as artistic director of the Guanajuato Symphony Orchestra and director of the Camerata de las Américas, and conducts the Cepromusic Ensemble at the National Institute of Fine Arts. He has led more than seventy orchestras across twenty-five countries and recorded fifteen albums.

Iván Edeza (b. 11 February 1967, Mexico City) is a Mexican artist who has worked primarily with video since the 1990s. He pays close attention to the aural dimensions of his work, integrating industrial or experimental music, minimal processing of ambient sound, and strategic use of silence alongside the images captured by his camera. His practice treats sound not as illustration but as a compositional layer equal in weight to the visual — creating works in which acoustic and cinematic space inform one another. Edeza has participated in Mexican and international experimental art contexts, contributing to ongoing conversations about the intersections of image, sound, and perception.

Born in 1979, he studied at RMIT in Melbourne before moving to London to study sound art at London College of Communication under David Toop and Cathy Lane. Relocating to Brisbane in 2004, he co-founded OtherFilm with Sally Golding and Danni Zuvela, a curatorial project investigating film and moving image art. In 2013 he returned to Melbourne and became Artistic Director of Liquid Architecture, Australia's leading sonic art organisation, a post he held until 2022. That same year he co-founded Machine Listening with Sean Dockray and James Parker, a research platform examining the politics of computational sound.

Born in 1974 in Dannenberg, Lower Saxony, he is a self-taught clarinetist and composer based in Berlin, where he has been a central figure in the city's improvised music scene since the 1990s. His practice focuses on the subtle musicality of sound and noise phenomena, with particular attention to psychoacoustic effects. He co-founded the clarinet duo The International Nothing with Michael Thieke, and has worked with The Magic I.D. and Los Glissandinos. He has performed across Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia, appearing at major festivals and venues in over twenty countries.

Mikawa Toshiji (born 1957) is a Japanese noise musician and co-founder of Incapacitants, a Tokyo-based harsh noise duo with Toshiji Mikawa and Fumio Kosakai, formed in 1981. Incapacitants are known for extreme full-frequency noise generated from analogue electronics and circuit manipulation, performed at high volume. Mikawa has also released solo work under his own name, maintaining a practice of uncompromising harsh noise across four decades. He is associated with the original Japanese noise scene alongside Merzbow, Government Alpha, and others, and his work has been distributed through Alchemy Records and international noise labels.

Based in Darmstadt, Essel (born 1948) works in improvised music and what he calls Grundlagenmusik — foundational or elemental music — exploring the most reduced conditions under which sound can still constitute a musical act. His project Saitensack uses unmodified, unamplified violin and viola to push the instruments toward their physical limits, producing tones that resist conventional classification. A second project, Zeitfalten, routes tape through a Revox A77 reel machine so that each recorded sound plays back nine seconds later, folding time into audible accumulation. He has played with the group ARGO, formed in Darmstadt in 1985.

Architect and sound researcher based in Bogotá, he has developed installations and exhibitions exploring sound culture in relation to architectural space since 2012. Since 2015 he has focused on the vast archive of his father Oswaldo Lares, an ethnomusicologist who made field recordings of Venezuelan folk music from 1969 to 1990. Through his platform ArchivoLares, he curates and presents this material in collaborative and interdisciplinary artistic contexts. He has exhibited at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and works across curatorial, performative, and research modes to make this historical Venezuelan sound culture available and resonant for contemporary audiences.

Edgar Válcárcel (1932–2010) was a Peruvian composer and one of the most important figures in the Latin American musical avant-garde of the twentieth century. Born in Puno, he studied composition in Lima and later in New York and worked in both electroacoustic and instrumental music, becoming a foundational figure in the development of contemporary composition in Peru.

His work combined experimental composition with a deep engagement with Andean indigenous music, graphic notation, political expression, and social critique.

Based in Berlin, he studied Cultural Studies and Digital Media in Lüneburg before completing a degree in Sound Studies at the University of the Arts Berlin, where he now teaches in the MA programme. His installations and performances explore relations between medium and message, signal and noise, and temporality, often using turntables as improvising instruments. He is a board member of Cashmere Radio and runs Chronopolis, a programme for generative music on that station, co-hosted with Jacob Eriksen and Gregor Pfeffer. His album timestretched-ACID subjects two TB-303 synthesizers to a sequence of laboratory-like interventions.

COUM Transmissions was a British performance art collective active from 1969 to 1977, founded by Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti, initially in Hull and later in London. Beginning as a loose community of artists, musicians, and performers, COUM developed increasingly confrontational performances engaging with sexuality, identity, and social limits — staged actions incorporating bodily fluids, medical instruments, and explicit erotic material.

Their most notorious project, the Prostitution exhibition at the ICA London in 1976 — featuring photos from Cosey Fanni Tutti's work as a pornographic magazine model, alongside performance documentation — caused a national scandal.

Antoine Chessex (b. 1980, Switzerland) is a Swiss composer and saxophonist whose work engages with extreme volume, sustained tones, and the physical experience of sound as a visceral phenomenon. Based primarily in Berlin, he has developed a practice that pushes the saxophone into territories of drone, noise, and sustained sonic force, often performed at high decibels with extended techniques that transform the instrument beyond its conventional range.

His compositions and performances are conceived as total sonic environments in which the physical impact of sound on bodies and architectural spaces becomes central to the artistic experience.

Born in New York in 1929, she studied at the Juilliard School of Music and the Art Students League before relocating to Europe. She worked through the 1970s and 1980s at EMS in Stockholm and at IRCAM in Paris, collaborating with Iannis Xenakis and Pierre Boulez. Describing her work as music for spiritual survival, she composed for tape, electronics, film, TV, and radio. Her best-known work is the 1985 LP Isolation! Meinhof In Memoriam, an electronic composition memorialising Red Army Faction co-founder Ulrike Meinhof, self-released on her own label Music in Crisis. She died in 2014.

William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) was an American novelist and one of the most important figures of the Beat Generation, best known for Naked Lunch (1959) — published first in Paris after being refused in the United States — and his development of the cut-up literary technique with Brion Gysin. The cut-up, which involved literally cutting up and rearranging texts to produce new meanings and associations, was Burroughs's most radical formal contribution and has influenced writers, musicians, and visual artists ever since.

Born in 1964 in Culemborg, the Netherlands, he is a visual artist, performer, musician, and curator whose work moves across vinyl, performance, installation, and concrete poetry. As artistic director of the Rotterdam-based publisher and label De Player, he conceives vinyl records as sculptural objects and performances as publications. His practice draws on grim absurdism, everyday sounds, and unconscious association as compositional tools. He is a member of the cult-I-media group Coolhaven and of Ultra Hobby Complex, and performs internationally in clubs, festivals, and galleries while also teaching at art academies.

Dinos Chapman (b. 1962, London) and Jake Chapman (b. 1966, Cheltenham) studied together at the Royal College of Art from 1988 to 1990, having previously worked as assistants to Gilbert and George. Their collaboration began in 1991 and rose to prominence through the Young British Artists exhibitions Brilliant! and Sensation in the mid-1990s. Working in sculpture, installation, printmaking, and painting, their practice engages with evil, violence, and moral outrage—from mutilated mannequins and Nazi imagery to their repainting of Goya's Disasters of War etchings and their appropriation of original Hitler watercolours in 2008. In 2022 they ended their professional partnership.

New York-based curator who served as Executive Director of Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center for 37 years from 1987, championing experimental artworks exploring sound, data, and technology. She is a founding member of TELLUS, the Audio Cassette Magazine, a cassette publication of experimental music issued between 1982 and 1996, and was Executive Producer of the New York Electronic Art Festival. Her educational background includes Skidmore College and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and she has served on panels for the NEA and NYSCA.

Albania Juárez (born 1987, Mexico City) is a Mexican transdisciplinary performer working across sound, printmaking, and painting. Trained at UNAM and ENPEG La Esmeralda, she studied at Kunstakademie Karlsruhe on a Baden-Württemberg scholarship in 2015. Her sound practice uses musical saw, ukulele, voice, ocarinas, and field recordings, with thematic roots in mysticism, agroecology, Mexican herbalism, and the milpa agricultural system. She held a residency at CMMAS (Morelia, 2022), documenting soundscapes of milpa communities in Michoacán. She releases on Nuube and Psychonautica and performs in the free folk quartet Montañas Rojas.

Matmos is the American electronic duo of M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel, formed in San Francisco in the early 1990s and based in Baltimore since. Their practice is defined by conceptual sampling — building entire albums from sounds derived from a single source or theme, such as surgical procedures, crayfish nervous systems, or plastic consumer technology. The results are compositions of considerable sophistication, marked by a tension between the absurdity of the source and the rigour of the outcome. Long associated with Björk — for whom they served as co-producers on Vespertine (2001) and Medúlla (2004) — Matmos occupy a distinctive place between conceptual art, queer culture, and dance.

John Wiese is an American noise artist and musician based in Los Angeles whose extensive discography spans solo recordings, collaborative projects, and releases on his own Helicopter label. Working with electronics, computer processing, and acoustic instruments, he creates recordings of extraordinary textural density and dynamic range. He has collaborated with Wolf Eyes, Prurient, C. Spencer Yeh, and many others. His work is characterized by an intelligent engagement with the aesthetics of noise as form, treating extreme sound as material for genuine compositional investigation.

André Almuro (1929–1989) was a French-Cuban composer and a member of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in Paris. Working with musique concrète and early electroacoustic techniques from the 1960s, he produced a body of work that engaged with tropical sound environments, rhythm, and the transformation of acoustic material through tape manipulation. His works were distributed through the GRM's archives and performances, and he remained a relatively little-documented figure within the larger GRM constellation — though his recordings demonstrate compositional imagination and technical facility within the concrete music tradition.

George Lewis (born 1952) is an American trombonist, composer, and scholar, a central figure of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and a pioneer of interactive computer music. His Voyager system (from 1987) is an interactive composition environment that responds to live musicians with its own improvisational logic. His scholarly work — particularly A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (2008) — is a foundational text for understanding the history of African American experimental music. He is a professor at Columbia University and continues to perform and compose actively.

Independent filmmaker, musician, software programmer, and co-founder of the Dutch experimental collective Telcosystems, which he formed with David Kiers and Lucas van der Velden. He studied interaction design at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht and image and sound at the Royal Conservatoire and Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. Telcosystems creates immersive audiovisual installations, films, and live performances that explore the interaction between technology and machine behaviour. The collective has presented work at Transmediale, Sonar, IFFR, Oberhausen, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, SXSW, and STRP Biennale.

Davide Tidoni is an Italian artist and researcher currently based in Brussels. His practice works across the physical, perceptual, and affective dimensions of sound — acoustic territory explorations, site-specific interventions, audio pieces, performances, ethnographic fieldwork, and listening workshops — with a particular emphasis on observation, action, and participation. He is interested in the relational dimension of listening, sound-space interactions, and how sound functions in everyday social life.

Aran Kleebaur is a German performer, noise musician, and DJ active in the contemporary European experimental performance and electronic music scene. They studied at Trinity College Dublin and the Institut für Angewandte Theaterwissenschaften in Gießen, developing a practice that intersects performance, biophysical interactive systems, and experimental instruments. Kleebaur has contributed to discussions of extended performance techniques and experimental electronics in institutional contexts including Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt.

Born in Seoul in 1932, he trained as a classical musician before moving to West Germany in the late 1950s to study music history. Encountering John Cage and the Fluxus movement—which he joined in 1962—he redirected toward radical art, and in 1963 staged his debut exhibition at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, scattering distorted televisions across the gallery. Widely regarded as the founder of video art, his subsequent work—Global Groove (1973), TV Buddha (1974), TV Garden (1974–78)—established the moving image as a sculptural medium. He died in 2006.

Allora & Calzadilla is a collaborative artistic duo formed by Jennifer Allora (b. 1974, Philadelphia) and Guillermo Calzadilla (b. 1971, Havana), based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Since the mid-1990s, they have worked together across sculpture, performance, video, and sound, consistently engaging with questions of geopolitics, ecology, collective memory, and the intersection of human bodies with political and natural systems.

Their work frequently uses sound — musical performance, amplified machines, transformed instruments — to activate and trouble the relationship between spectacle, power, and public space. In Algorithm (2011), athletes perform atop functioning arcade games.

Born in Durango, Mexico in 1976, Marcela Armas studied at the University of Guanajuato and later in Valencia, and is now based in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato. Her practice centres on large-scale installations examining energy use as a political and ethical condition. Her work I Machinarius deployed 31 industrial cranes to trace the outline of Mexico using a chain lubricated with petroleum. Her installation Resistance delineated the US-Mexico border with incandescent metal filament. She received the ARCO/BEEP Award at ARCO Madrid in 2012 and the VIDA 16.0 prize from the Telefónica Foundation.

Seth Price (b. 1973) is an American artist whose practice spans sculpture, video, writing, and distribution, addressing how culture circulates. His early work engaged directly with distribution — releasing video and audio works as downloadable files designed to circulate outside gallery contexts — while investigating the aesthetic dimensions of those formats. His sculptures use industrial materials — foam, resin, polymer fabric — to foreground the relationship between information and physical substance. His widely circulated essay "Dispersion" (2002), itself distributed across PDFs and printed booklets, became a touchstone for thinking about art in an age of networked reproduction.

Bad Brains is an American punk rock band formed in Washington, D.C. in 1976, originally as a jazz fusion group before pivoting to hardcore punk with extraordinary speed and intensity. The band — H.R. (Paul Hudson), vocals; Dr. Know (Gary Miller), guitar; Darryl Jennifer, bass; and Earl Hudson, drums — became one of the most influential groups in American punk and hardcore, combining ferocious technical musicianship with Rastafarian spirituality.

Their debut album Bad Brains (1982) and the subsequent Rock for Light (1983), produced by Ric Ocasek, are considered foundational documents of hardcore punk.

Amalia Ulman (b. 1989) is an Argentinian-Spanish artist working in performance, video, photography, and writing. Her most discussed work, Excellences & Perfections (2014), was a four-month performance on Instagram in which she inhabited the persona of a young woman moving through social media narratives of aspiration, self-improvement, breakdown, and recovery. It was received as authentic until Ulman revealed it as planned fiction, exposing the visual grammars of femininity and class aspiration in social media culture. Her practice later extended into narrative film with El Planeta (2021), an absurdist comedy starring herself and her mother, which premiered at Sundance.

Wardruna is a Norwegian musical project founded by Einar Selvik in 2003, dedicated to the interpretation and reconstruction of Norse and Viking-age musical traditions using historical instruments, Old Norse texts, and natural soundscapes. Selvik — also known as Kvitrafn — was previously drummer of the Norwegian black metal band Gorgoroth, and brought from that experience a commitment to authentic Norse cultural expression that would take a very different form.

Dome is a British studio project formed by Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis of Wire in 1980. Working independently of Wire's post-punk context, the duo developed a series of austere, experimental recordings released on Mute's Dome imprint — three self-titled albums plus the Domo and Will You Speak This Word? releases. Using minimal means, repetitive structures, tape experiments, and Gilbert's guitar processed beyond recognition, the albums anticipated industrial music, minimal wave, and the broader post-punk experimentation of the early 1980s. Both artists continued with Wire and their own solo projects; Gilbert remains active as a visual and sound artist.

A New York-based multi-instrumentalist, Steve Moore co-founded the Pittsburgh synth-prog duo Zombi, whose music drew on vintage horror scores by Goblin and John Carpenter and proved influential in the later synthwave revival. His prolific solo work ranges across film composition, minimal techno, and disco: soundtracks include The Mind's Eye and Mayhem, both released on Relapse Records, while techno singles have appeared on Kompakt and L.I.E.S. He has also released disco material under the alias Gianni Rossi, including the 2011 album Burning Feeling, and provided remixes for Washed Out, Voivod, and The Melvins. All his film scores are composed and performed solely on synthesizers.

Alvin Lucier (1931–2021) was an American composer whose work stands as one of the most original and influential bodies of music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Born in Nashua, New Hampshire, he studied at Yale and Brandeis before joining the faculty at Wesleyan University, where he taught for decades.

His landmark work I Am Sitting in a Room (1969) records a spoken text in a room and re-records the playback repeatedly, until the resonant frequencies of the room overwhelm the words themselves. The piece demonstrated, with great beauty and precision, how acoustic physics could function as both compositional method and expressive material.

Jimmie Durham (b. 1940, Washington, Arkansas) is an American artist and writer of Cherokee descent whose work in sculpture, performance, and text has consistently addressed Native American identity, colonialism, and the violent histories embedded in everyday objects. His sculptures — incorporating found materials, animal parts, and handwritten texts — are simultaneously lyrical and politically pointed. He was a founding member of the American Indian Movement's international commission and has lived in Europe since 1994. He received the Golden Lion at Venice in 2019 for lifetime achievement.

Richard D. James (b. 1971, Limerick, Ireland; raised in Cornwall) is a British electronic musician who records primarily as Aphex Twin. His recordings on Warp Records — Selected Ambient Works 85–92 (1992), Selected Ambient Works Volume II (1994), Richard D. James Album (1996), and Drukqs (2001) — define the outer limits of techno, ambient, IDM, and drill 'n' bass, producing music of extraordinary variety and technical sophistication.

James began making electronic music as a teenager in Cornwall, developing an early fluency with synthesizers and drum machines that would underpin decades of prolific output.

Sublime Frequencies is an American archival and ethnographic label founded in 2003 by Alan Bishop and his brother Hisham Bishop in Seattle. Releasing field recordings, bootleg radio transmissions, traditional music, and popular music from the Middle East, Southeast Asia, North Africa, and beyond, the label operates with a deliberately lo-fi, immersive aesthetic that resists academic framing. Releases have documented music from Morocco, Burma, Syria, Niger, Indonesia, and many other regions. The label functions alongside Alan Bishop's band Sun City Girls as a vehicle for radical archival curiosity and anti-colonial music archaeology.

Born in Pasadena, California in 1931, she returned to art after raising three children, studying at Chouinard Art Institute and receiving an MFA from UC Irvine in 1971. A pioneer of West Coast performance art, her work from the 1960s onward engaged the body, food, sexuality, and spirituality. Notable works include Ritual Meal (1969), in which guests ate with surgical instruments while wearing scrubs, and Feed Me (1973), a durational solo performance exploring intimacy and need. Her work is held at the Getty Museum, the Hammer Museum, and LACMA.

Kraftwerk is a German electronic band formed in Düsseldorf in 1969 by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider. Widely credited as the originators of electronic pop, their work on albums including Autobahn (1974), Radio-Activity (1975), Trans-Europe Express (1977), The Man-Machine (1978), and Computer World (1981) established a musical language of sequenced synthesisers, drum machines, and robotic vocals that became foundational for techno, hip-hop, synth-pop, and electronic music at large. Their stage presence — four figures in matching suits behind banks of electronics — compressed human and machine into a single austere spectacle.

Eduardo Kac (b. 1962, Rio de Janeiro) is a Brazilian-American artist and theorist whose work has pioneered bio-art, telepresence, and transgenic art. His project GFP Bunny (2000) — creating a rabbit with a fluorescent green protein through genetic engineering — generated international debate about the ethics and aesthetics of biotechnology. He coined the term bio-art and has exhibited and published internationally. His work raises profound questions about life, technology, and the boundaries of art practice that remain urgently relevant in an era of accelerating biotechnological development.

Coil was a British experimental music project formed in 1982 by Peter Christopherson and John Balance, which became one of the most original and influential acts in industrial, occult, and electronic music. Their discography — including Scatology (1984), Horse Rotorvator (1986), Love's Secret Domain (1991), and Time Machines (1998) — demonstrates extraordinary range and depth. Deeply embedded in occult practice, gay identity, and psychedelic experience, their work resists categorization. Balance died in 2004; Christopherson died in 2010. Their legacy continues to grow.

Incapacitants is a Japanese noise duo formed in the late 1980s by Toshiji Mikawa and Fumio Kosakai, both of whom are reportedly government employees who have maintained their day jobs throughout their musical career. Their performances and recordings — on labels including Public Bath — are among the most extreme in harsh noise, combining pure white noise, feedback, and electronic overload into relentless, overwhelming events. They are revered within the global harsh noise community for their total commitment to intensity and their consistency over three decades.

Hans Rudolf Zeller (b. 1934) is a German musicologist, composer, and critic whose theoretical and creative contributions to new music have been significant since the 1960s. He has written extensively on serial music, spectralism, and the aesthetics of contemporary composition, contributing to the discourse surrounding the Darmstadt school and subsequent developments. His critical writings have helped shape how composers and audiences engage with the most demanding contemporary music. He has also composed works that reflect the theoretical positions he has developed in his writings.

Vincent Schoutsen is a Dutch artist and musician based in Utrecht whose practice blends hardcore dance culture with engineering and live performance. His work often involves modified or hacked machines repurposed as instruments: his piece The Hardcore Trainer converted an exercise crosstrainer into a live electronic instrument generating raw, danceable hardcore. His 2025 installation The DreamFeed, presented at the GOGBOT festival in Enschede, invited visitors to feed their fears and anxieties into a collective algorithm, transforming the doomscroll into a physically embodied ritual. He is also a member of Het Uitvindersgilde, a collective of sustainable artist-engineers.

The Nihilist Spasm Band is a Canadian free noise ensemble formed in London, Ontario in 1965. The group — which has included Art Pratten, John Boyle, Bill Exley, and others over the decades — performs on handmade and modified instruments, producing free improvised music that has no concern for conventional pitch, rhythm, or structure.

Active for over fifty years with a stable rotating membership, they are one of the longest-running free noise groups in the world. They perform regularly at their home base in London, Ontario, and have toured internationally, maintaining a resolutely amateur and anti-professional ethos throughout.

Holly Herndon is an American composer and artist born in Tennessee and based in Berlin. Her practice integrates electronic music, machine learning, and extended vocal techniques, with a sustained interest in networks, surveillance, and collective identity. Albums including Movement (2012), Platform (2015), and PROTO (2019) — developed with AI collaborator Spawn — established her as a central figure in contemporary electronic and experimental music. She holds a doctorate from Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. She co-runs the Interdependence podcast and the Holly+ platform.

Laibach is a Slovenian industrial and conceptual band formed in Trbovlje in 1980, operating as a subgroup of the Neue Slowenische Kunst collective. Their work deploys totalitarian aesthetics, bombastic arrangements, and cover versions of popular and classical music to explore ideology, power, and collective identity through irony and overidentification. Albums including Rekapitulacija 1980–1984, Opus Dei (1987), and Let It Be (1988) established their confrontational method. They have performed in North Korea, released scores, and collaborated across visual art, theatre, and film.

Italian curator and promoter of experimental music with a background in Oriental Studies, Manuela Benetton is one of the key figures shaping experimental music culture in Berlin, where she arrived in 2002 and has spent over fifteen years building networks across the city's underground scenes. Operating between Berlin and northern Italy — with close ties to Milan and Venice — she curates and produces concerts and events bringing together artists working in improvisation, noise, and electronic music. She has presented Terry Riley, Nurse With Wound, Charlemagne Palestine, Ellen Fullman, and Keiji Haino at Berlin venues including the Elizabethkirche and Villa Elisabeth.

Zeitkratzer is a Berlin-based chamber ensemble founded by Reinhold Friedl in 1997, comprising musicians from classical, jazz, and experimental backgrounds. The ensemble specialises in live performance of extreme and experimental music — works by Helmut Lachenmann, Alvin Lucier, and Terre Thaemlitz — and cross-genre projects with Whitehouse (performing their electronic music acoustically), Lou Reed, and Keiji Haino. Their approach challenges boundaries between notated composition and free improvisation, and between classical performance practice and avant-garde noise.

Anthony McCall (b. 1946) is a British artist based in New York, best known for "solid light" films that turn projected light itself into a sculptural object. His 1973 work Line Describing a Cone projects a slowly evolving line that, through haze in the air, becomes a tangible cone of light viewers can walk around and through.

Emerging from the experimental film and performance scenes of 1970s London and New York, McCall's work sits between cinema, sculpture, and drawing, foregrounding the physical apparatus of projection — light, dust, smoke, and duration — as the work's actual subject, rather than any image on a screen.

Walter Hus (born 1959) is a Belgian composer and pianist known for his work in contemporary classical music and interdisciplinary performance. Based in Belgium, he has composed for chamber ensemble, orchestra, and electronics, and has performed and presented work at major European new music festivals. His compositions engage with the relationship between contemporary classical writing and more popular or vernacular musical sources, and he has been involved in opera and music theatre as well as concert music. He teaches at the Royal Conservatory of Ghent and has been a significant figure in Belgian new music for several decades.

Haco is a Japanese vocalist, composer, and electronic musician based in Osaka. A founding member of the group After Dinner, with whom she released experimental pop records on ReR Megacorp in the 1980s and 1990s, she has maintained a sustained solo practice of electroacoustic composition and extended vocal technique. Her works explore the boundaries of language and sound through processing, multi-tracking, and a careful attention to the material of the voice. She has collaborated with Tetsu Inoue, John Zorn, and others, and releases on Tzadik and her own label. She also works extensively with the Otomo Yoshihide circle in Japan.

Akitsa is a Canadian black metal and noise project from Québec, formed in the late 1990s by Outre-Tombe (Dominick) and Néant. Known for its raw, lo-fi aggression, ideological intensity and uncompromising sonic assault, it has cultivated a cult following within the underground extreme music community. Drawing from French-Canadian heritage, history and misanthropic themes, the duo delivers harsh, punk-infused black metal that upholds true underground spirit through self-produced releases and a defiant, individualistic ethos. Key releases include Là où les ombres s'éternisent and multiple cassette-only editions.

German avant-garde artist (12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) who developed the concept of Social Sculpture, the idea that every human being is an artist and that society itself can be shaped as a work of art. Appointed professor of sculpture at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in 1961, he was central to Fluxus from the mid-1960s. His signature materials, felt and fat, derived from a mythologised account of his rescue after a wartime plane crash. His 7000 Oaks project, begun at documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982, planted trees paired with basalt columns across the city as a living social artwork.

Anne Imhof (b. 1978, Giessen, Germany) is a German artist working across performance, painting, drawing, and music. Her large-scale durational performances — often involving trained performers executing slow, controlled movements in elaborately constructed environments — explore themes of power, submission, desire, and contemporary alienation.

Imhof represented Germany at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017 with her performance Faust, for which she was awarded the Golden Lion for best national participation. The work involved performers moving through and beneath a glass floor installed in the German Pavilion, accompanied by an original music score.

Brett Wagg is a Berlin-based label owner, primarily working in the fields of Noise and Industrial Music. The sole operator of the label Total Black, founded in Montreal in 2012, and the Sentimental Youth brick-and-mortar record store in Berlin. Brett Wagg has been working in the DIY music community in North America and Europe for close to 20 years. He has been organizing and curating events since 2005, becoming increasingly interested in the importance of physical spaces for underground community building and in-person interaction and exchanges between the audience and the artists.

Mexican electronic music project founded in 1985 by Mateo Lafontaine and Carlos García, Década 2 developed a dark, ironic, and iconoclastic sound drawing on Joy Division, early industrial, and electronic body music, set against sociopolitical and dystopian themes. Their physically imposing beats, distorted synth melodies, and subwoofer-heavy bass made them cult figures among goths, punks, and underground audiences across Mexico and beyond. Fuelled by Lafontaine's collection of vintage electronic instruments, the project remained loyal to the underground for decades. It ceased operations following the death of Mateo Lafontaine in 2020.

DJ Stingray, born Sherard Ingram, is the founder of Urban Tribe and an associate of legendary Detroit electro duo Drexciya. Taught how to DJ by Kenny Dixon Jr. (Moodymann) in the mid-1980s, he gradually developed and perfected his dense, high-speed mixing style while DJing at biker bars in Detroit, slipping bits of techno tracks in with Miami booty bass and West Coast electro and hip-hop.

As both DJ and producer, Ingram specializes in futuristic electro, preferring fast tempos and inventive beat patterns to more accessible, club-friendly rhythms.

Bathory was a Swedish extreme metal band formed in Vällingby in 1983 by Thomas Forsberg, who recorded and performed under the name Quorthon. Named after Hungarian countess Elizabeth Báthory, the band is credited as a pioneer of both black metal and Viking metal — two of the most significant developments in extreme music of the late twentieth century.

The early Bathory albums — Bathory (1984), The Return (1985), and Under the Sign of the Black Mark (1987) — alongside Venom and Hellhammer, define the first wave of black metal: raw, lo-fi, satanic, and deliberately primitive.

A Chilean-Spanish artist and researcher based between Vienna and Berlin, Spencer trained as a forest engineer in Chile before studying photography and film at EICTV in Cuba. In 1996 he founded TRema, the first Chilean experimental sound collective, and in 2007 co-founded LaMe, Chile's first media lab, a platform for open experimentation in sound art, hardware hacking, and interactivity. His installations set massive physical materials — rock, metal, wind — against the immateriality of sound. The Terra Ignota project documents seven years of fieldwork in Tierra del Fuego, Patagonia, and Antarctica.

Okkyung Lee (b. 1975, South Korea) is a Korean-American cellist based in New York whose work with free improvisation, noise, and cross-genre collaboration has made her one of the most significant and versatile string players in contemporary experimental music. She studied classical cello in South Korea and the United States before moving toward improvised and experimental practice, developing an approach to the cello that draws from noise, free jazz, contemporary classical music, and Korean musical traditions.

Alan Courtis, better known as Anla Courtis, is an Argentine experimental musician and founding member of the legendary Buenos Aires group Reynols. Formed in 1993, Reynols — which included drummer Miguel Tomasín, who has Down syndrome, as an equal creative force — produced some of the most celebrated and mysterious music to emerge from South America, combining noise, psychedelia, folk, and free improvisation in ways that were as much conceptual as musical.

After Reynols concluded, Courtis continued as a prolific solo artist and collaborator, working with noise, drone, extended guitar techniques, and field recordings.

Born in 1958 in Burgbrohl and based in Cologne, he received an MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts Münster in 1984 and has since operated at the intersection of sound art, environmental research, and curatorial practice. As a founding member of the Rachel Haferkamp Gallery in Cologne, he has curated audio-visual festivals, intermedia concert series, and media dance programmes with a focus on the Cologne electronic music and sound art scenes. He has participated in ISEA symposia and collaborated with international artists including Collins + Goto Studio on site-specific sound projects.

Yuko Mohri (b. 1980) is a Japanese artist based in Tokyo known for her kinetic installations in which everyday objects — found materials, scientific equipment, musical instruments — are set into unpredictable motion by electrical circuits, natural phenomena, and carefully designed but impossible-to-control systems. The resulting works produce incidental sound and movement that cannot be predetermined, making each work a site of ongoing contingency and surprise.

Her installations often use the weather as a compositional element — humidity, temperature, and barometric pressure triggering different behaviors in the physical and electronic systems she constructs.

Born in 1965 in Glasgow, Susan Philipsz currently lives and works in Berlin. She received a BFA in Sculpture from Duncan of Jordanstone College in Dundee, Scotland, in 1993, and an MFA from the University of Ulster in Belfast in 1994. In 2000, she completed a fellowship at MoMA PS1 in New York. She received the Turner Prize in 2010 and was awarded an OBE in 2014 for services to British art.

Since the mid-1990s, Philipsz’s sound installations have been exhibited at many prestigious institutions and public venues around the world.

7038634357 is the alias of Neo Gibson, a musician and producer working in experimental ambient and sound collage. The project originated through self-released CD-Rs and intimate live performances before reaching wider audiences via the Blank Forms label. The 2019 album Neo Seven, recorded and synthesized entirely on computer, presents seven tracks that move between soundscape, song, and silence, marked by formal precision and an intensely personal emotional register. Gibson's work is noted for its melodic clarity within an experimental framework, with each release maintaining a handmade, closely held quality regardless of format.

Wolf Eyes is an American noise group formed in Michigan in the late 1990s, led by Nate Young and for many years also featuring Aaron Dilloway and John Olson. They are known for their visceral blend of harsh noise, industrial, and lo-fi electronics — music that combines the physical intensity of metal with the conceptual concerns of the American underground art scene.

Early releases on American Tapes — John Olson's cassette label — circulated through the noise underground and established Wolf Eyes as a genuinely extreme proposition.

Column One is a German art collective and label founded in Berlin in the early 1990s, active in industrial, experimental, and multimedia contexts. The collective operates across music, performance, and visual art, maintaining a consistently transgressive and anti-commercial stance toward their work and its distribution.

They have released numerous recordings on their own label and in collaboration with other experimental music imprints, producing work that draws from industrial music, noise, concrete poetry, and found sound. Their performances and events engage with the politics of spectacle and the relationship between art and social control.

Mark Luyten is a Belgian artist working with photography, video, and installation. His work engages with questions of memory, identity, and the representation of the human body through photographic and moving image work. Active in Belgian and international contemporary art contexts, he has exhibited at major institutions and contributed to ongoing conversations about representation, documentary practice, and the ethics of photography. His work reflects sustained attention to how photographic and cinematic images construct the subjects they purport to record.

American conceptual, body, and earth artist (6 September 1938 – 21 January 2011) who cultivated an innovative practice across five decades. As an early pioneer of land art, his ephemeral earthworks included Annual Rings (1968), rings carved in the snow on the US-Canada border, and Gallery Transplant (1969). His body art, developed from 1968 alongside Vito Acconci, included Reading Position for Second Degree Burn (1970). From the early 1980s his machine pieces, complex space-filling devices, explored psychological and physical limit. He was pivotal to the foundational moments of performance, conceptual, and earth art as distinct movements.

Born on 15 March 1959 in Schwanenstadt, Upper Austria, he settled in Berlin in 1982 and taught at the Musikschule Kreuzberg while founding the Zwischentöne ensemble in 1988. His compositional practice centres on noise, white sound, and the dissolution of musical material into environment, most fully developed in the Weiss/Weisslich cycle — a series begun around 1980 that grew to thirty-six parts, investigating white noise through instrumental works, installations, and scores. He received the Berliner Kunstpreis Förderungspreis in 1998 and the Österreichischer Kunstpreis in 2020. He died on 17 April 2025.

Himitsu King is a Japanese alternative noise-core band from Osaka, operating in the underground experimental and extreme music scene. Emerging from Osaka's dense network of noise, punk, and avant-garde music communities — a city with a long history of confrontational underground practice stretching from Boredoms and Hanatarash through successive generations of independent artists — Himitsu King contributes to a tradition that treats noise and extreme sound as a vehicle for alternative expression and radical intensity.

Richie Culver is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice operates at the interstice of contemporary image culture, expanded sound, and post-documentary poetics. His work investigates the unstable architectures of memory, place, and digital subjectivity, examining how personal and collective narratives migrate across media and sediment within aesthetic form. Culver studied Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, an experience that catalyzed his engagement with expanded forms of image-making and established the conceptual foundation for his later intermedial inquiries.

Babi Badalov (b. 1959) is an Azerbaijani-born artist living in exile in Paris, known for text-based installations, paintings, and performances that play with language, migration, and identity. Working across Azeri, Russian, French, and English, he layers fragments of words and puns onto fabric, paper, and found objects.

Badalov's nomadic biography — including periods of statelessness — informs an art practice built from linguistic displacement: invented words, visual rhymes between alphabets, and slogans that turn the experience of not quite belonging to any single language into a generative artistic method.

Vomir is the project of French musician Romain Perrot, known for his extreme harsh noise wall recordings and performances in which he stands completely motionless, often in a plastic bag over his head, for extended periods while the music — a dense, static wall of undifferentiated harsh noise — plays at overwhelming volume. This position — total immobility, total sonic extremity — is both an aesthetic program and a philosophical statement about the function of noise.

Perrot has theorized his practice as nihiliste, deploying noise not as a vehicle for transgression, provocation, or aesthetic reward, but as a consistent negation of all those categories.

Scuba (Paul Rose, born 1980) is a British electronic musician and DJ based in Berlin. Founder of the Hotflush Recordings label, his music occupies a space between dubstep, techno, and darker club forms — developing the post-dubstep aesthetic of the late 2000s toward more minimal, Berlin-influenced techno. Albums Triangulation (2010) and Personality (2012) marked his increasing distance from the dubstep template toward a more personal hybrid of electronic styles. His Hotflush label has been an important platform for artists including Mount Kimbie, who helped define the post-dubstep sound internationally.

Suckling Blu operates at the margins of the underground electronic and noise circuit, working in a tradition of small-run cassette and digital releases circulated through independent labels and DIY live nights rather than major distribution. As with much of this scene, public biographical detail is scarce, and the project is best approached through its sound.

The name points toward a tactile, lo-fi mode of production: modest pressings, hand-assembled artwork, and a focus on atmosphere and texture over conventional song form. On bills alongside other experimental and noise acts, expect work built on mood, repetition, and raw, unpolished production.

Bauhaus was an English post-punk band formed in Northampton in 1978, comprising Peter Murphy, Daniel Ash, David J, and Kevin Haskins. Their debut single Bela Lugosi's Dead (1979) — nine minutes of gothic atmospherics, minimal dub-inflected bass, and Murphy's theatrical baritone — effectively inaugurated the gothic rock genre. Albums In the Flat Field (1980) and Mask (1981) extended their exploration of dramatic, dark post-punk. Though they dissolved in 1983, individual members continued through Tones on Tail and Love and Rockets, and Bauhaus reunited on multiple occasions. Their visual and sonic vocabulary became definitive reference points for gothic culture.

Anat Pick is a scholar of film and media whose work focuses on animal studies, ecology, and the philosophy of vulnerability in visual culture. She is the author of Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film, which proposes a way of reading cinema attentive to the bodily, exposed condition shared by humans and animals alike.

Her writing draws on philosophers including Simone Weil and Emmanuel Levinas to challenge anthropocentric assumptions in film theory, examining how documentary and experimental film represent — or fail to represent — nonhuman life, and contributing to the broader fields of ecocriticism and posthumanist thought.

DJ Olive (Gregor Asch) is a New York-based DJ, producer, and sound artist, co-founder of the We™ (Why?) turntable collective. Working at the intersection of turntablism, ambient music, and free improvisation, he approaches the DJ set as a form of live composition rather than music playback — building slow, textural works from vinyl sources that occupy a distinctly different space from club DJ culture. He has collaborated with Yuka Honda, DJ Spooky, and others, and has released on Wordsound and other independent labels. His practice has been noted for its quietness and patient attention in a field often defined by maximalism.

Born in Vermont in 1976 and based in Berlin, she is a composer, performer, and improviser who plays trumpet, electronics, voice, and conch, as well as a self-designed quadraphonic trumpet capable of projecting several independent channels of sound simultaneously. Her practice spans electroacoustic composition, extended technique, noise, and experimental rock. While living in San Francisco she performed with Anthony Braxton, Fred Frith, and the Rova Saxophone Quartet. She has since appeared at Donaueschingen, Darmstadt, Maerzmusik, Huddersfield, CTM, Berlin JazzFest, and Berghain, among other international venues.

Taylor Deupree is an American musician, visual artist, and label founder based in New York. He founded the 12k label in 1997, which has become one of the most respected imprints in minimal electronic and electroacoustic music, with a roster including Christopher Willits, Steve Roden, and Marcus Fischer. His own recordings explore delicate textural compositions of barely-there sound, field recordings, and deteriorating analogue signals. Albums including Stil. (2008) and Northern (2012) exemplify his precise, restrained aesthetic. He also maintains a longstanding practice in graphic design and visual art.

Hanatarashi (ハナタラシ, meaning sniveler or snot-nosed in Japanese) was a noise band created by later Boredoms frontman Yamantaka Eye in Osaka in 1983. The other core member during the early years was later Zeni Geva drummer and Boredoms co-founder Ikuo Taketani. Hanatarash used a variety of unusual noise-making objects on stage — power tools, drills, and heavy machinery — creating performances of extreme and occasionally dangerous physical intensity.

A notorious 1985 performance at a venue in Osaka involved Eye operating a small bulldozer on stage, causing significant damage to the space and injuring an audience member.

Born in Montpellier on 30 June 1955 and long associated with Catalan culture, he is a pianist and composer who has built an extensive body of work centred on toy instruments, miniature ensembles, and a sensibility drawing on rock and roll, minimalism, and popular song. His group the Bel Canto Orquestra realises these ideas in collective form. He has collaborated with Robert Wyatt, PJ Harvey, Lee Ranaldo, and Faust, among many others. His prolific discography began in the late 1970s and has continued to expand across more than four decades, encompassing genres from toypop to avant-folk.

Born in Helsinki in 1963 and raised in Turku, he was a Finnish electronic musician who co-founded Pan Sonic in Turku in 1993 with Ilpo Väisänen, a duo whose minimal synthesizer work, built around distortion, sub-bass frequencies, and extreme dynamic range, became highly influential in European electronic music. He also co-founded the label Sähkö Recordings and released solo work under the aliases Ø, Kentolevi, and Philus, on labels including Touch, Raster-Noton, and Editions Mego. His collaborators included Alan Vega, Alva Noto, Björk, and Stephen O'Malley. He died in April 2017 at the age of 53.

Surgeon is the alias of Anthony Child, a Birmingham-based producer and DJ who has been a defining force in UK techno since the early 1990s. His approach is uncompromising — stripped to minimal, percussive structures with raw, abrasive textures and an almost industrial intensity that distinguishes his work from more polished European techno.

Early releases on his own Dynamic Tension label and the Berlin institution Tresor helped define the harder edge of British techno. Later work, including collaborative projects with Daniel Bean as British Murder Boys, expanded into even more severe territory.

Native Instrument is a duo of Stine Janvin (Norwegian vocalist and composer) and Felicity Mangan (Australian sound artist), based in Berlin. Their work places bioacoustics and vocal imitation at its centre — recordings of frogs, insects, birds and other non-human vocalisations are transformed, layered and performed alongside Janvin's own voice, which approaches these sounds through extended technique and precise mimicry.

The result is a body of work that blurs the boundary between ecological document and synthesised composition, between the animal and the technological, the found and the constructed.

Ulises Carrión (1941–1989) was a Mexican artist, writer, and theorist who left Mexico for Amsterdam in the early 1970s and became a central figure in international mail art, artists' books, and conceptual art. His essay The New Art of Making Books (1975) argued that a book is a space-time sequence — a structure of pages, sequence, and reading time — rather than a container for text, and remains foundational for the genre. His bookshop Other Books and So in Amsterdam was among the first artist-run distribution networks for artists' publications in Europe. His own works in mail art, performance, and video extended his theory into practice, and his writing remains foundational for book artists.

Christine Carol Newby (born 4 November 1951, Hull) co-founded performance art collective COUM Transmissions in 1969 and Throbbing Gristle in 1976 — pioneers of industrial music on their own Industrial Records label. Playing guitar, cornet, and electronics alongside Genesis P-Orridge, Chris Carter, and Peter Christopherson, TG dissolved in 1981. With Carter she formed Chris & Cosey, later Carter Tutti, producing some 32 albums of synth-pop and ambient electronics. Further work as Carter Tutti Void (with Nik Colk Void) and solo — Tutti (2019, Mute), 2t2 (2025). Memoir: Art Sex Music (2017).

The Slackers are an American ska and reggae band from New York City, formed in 1991. Drawing on Jamaican rocksteady and ska alongside soul and rhythm and blues, they developed a sound that is warmer and more melodic than the frantic pace of British two-tone, closer to the original Jamaican tradition. Albums including Better Late Than Never (1996), Wasted Days (1996), and Redline (1999) on Hellcat Records established them as one of the most accomplished and authentic American ska bands, with consistent touring keeping them active and respected in ska and reggae underground circles into the present.

Pepe Mogt, also known as Fussible, is a Mexican electronic musician and founding member of the Nortec Collective, the Tijuana-based group that fused norteño music, banda, and other regional Mexican styles with electronic dance music production. Emerging in the early 2000s, the Nortec aesthetic brought the border culture of Tijuana to international attention and became a touchstone for the intersection of regional folk traditions and contemporary electronic production. Mogt's work within and beyond the collective, both as Fussible and under his own name, continues to explore these connections from his base in Tijuana.

A founding member of the progressive rock and electroacoustic group Chac Mool in Mexico in the early 1980s, alongside Jorge Reyes, this Mexican composer and multi-instrumentalist has worked across experimental rock, electronic, and sound art contexts. He was also a member of the electronic duo Vía Láctea with Miguel Angel Nava and of the avant-rock group Decibel, whose work fused rock, jazz, and folk influences. His career spans several decades of exploratory music-making rooted in Mexico City's fertile underground scene.

James Hullick is an Australian composer and cultural organizer whose work spans contemporary classical composition, experimental music, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Based in Melbourne, he has founded festivals and organizations dedicated to experimental and new music in Australia. His compositions range across chamber music, electronics, and site-specific work. As an organizer and advocate, he has contributed significantly to the development of experimental music culture in Australia, creating platforms for local and international experimental artists and helping build audiences for demanding new work.

Pinocchio is a name used across the tape and underground electronic scene for solo and small-group projects working in experimental, ambient, and noise idioms, with releases circulating on small cassette labels and self-released digital platforms rather than major outlets.

Work released under this name tends toward improvised, lo-fi production: layered synthesizers, field recordings, and processed found sound assembled into short, loosely structured pieces. As with many aliases in this corner of the underground, documentation is sparse and scattered across compilation tapes and one-off digital releases rather than a fixed discography.

Joe Colley is an American noise artist and musician based in Oakland whose work explores the extreme possibilities of analogue electronics and tape manipulation. His solo recordings — on Agents of Chaos and other labels — use highly processed, dense, and often excruciating sound to create environments of maximum intensity. He has performed extensively in North American underground contexts and has collaborated with other experimental musicians. His practice is grounded in a commitment to the analogue, the physical, and the uncontrolled, treating noise as a medium of genuine emotional and physical intensity.

A Melbourne-based artist and instrument builder, he began exploring the sonic possibilities of self-made metallic instruments while studying sculpture at Victoria College, Prahran, between 1985 and 1988. Each of his instruments — constructed from found materials, with each piece taking up to three years to design and several weeks to build — is conceived as both a sound-producing object and a composition in itself. He has performed in the UK, USA, Japan, New Zealand, and Indonesia, and his recorded output includes the albums Friction (2004), Accepting the Machines (2009), and Magnets on Blank Tapes (2012).

Arrigo Barnabé (b. 1951, Londrina, Paraná) is a Brazilian composer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist who studied at the University of São Paulo and became deeply influenced by atonal and dodecaphonic techniques, particularly those of Arnold Schoenberg. His emergence in the late 1970s coincided with the Vanguarda Paulista movement, of which he is one of the key figures — a loose coalition of Brazilian musicians who challenged traditional popular music structures with formal complexity and theatrical invention.

William Seabrook (1884–1945) was an American journalist, author, and explorer. A WWI ambulance driver awarded the Croix de Guerre at Verdun, he traveled to Arabia, Haiti, and West Africa, writing accounts that blended adventure, ethnography, and the occult. His 1929 book The Magic Island is credited as the first English-language popular work to introduce the zombie concept from Haitian Vodou to Western audiences. Drawn to esoteric circles including Aleister Crowley, his writing combined anthropological observation with personal extremism and sensationalism.

Founded in Tokyo in 1981 by vocalist Shigehisa "Sakevi" Yokoyama and guitarist Randy Uchida, G.I.S.M. became one of Japan's most extreme and internationally cult-followed bands, fusing hardcore punk with heavy metal, early industrial, and avant-garde noise in a way unprecedented in the punk world. Their 1984 debut Detestation on Dogma Records is a benchmark of Japanese hardcore. The acronym was used in multiple versions including Guerrilla Incendiary Sabotage Mutineer. Yokoyama also published the punk zine P.O.W. in the mid-1980s. He died on 24 August 2023; the band's final album SoniCRIME TheRapy appeared in 2001.

Tashi Wada is an American composer and performer based in Los Angeles, son of sound artist Yoshi Wada. His practice works with sustained tones, just intonation, and acoustic beating phenomena — typically performed on organ, synthesiser, or with ensembles — to produce slowly evolving works of great physical presence. Releasing on Saltern and other labels, he has developed a compositional identity that engages directly with the just intonation tradition of La Monte Young and his father Yoshi Wada while establishing its own formal and sonic logic. He frequently collaborates with other musicians including Julia Holter and Jessika Kenney.

Dorothy Iannone (1933–2022) characterized her work as an ecstatic unity, encompassing multiple genres and media, including painting, photography, artist books, video, sound and text works, drawing, collage, and installations. Iannone's works were repeatedly censored due to their alleged pornographic content, even within the international art establishment. Her candid depictions of human sexuality show the body as the focus of both personal and public negotiation of social taboos and power dynamics.

In 1976, she received a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and moved to Berlin, where she remained for the rest of her life, calling it her home.

German composer and performer whose work treats music as anthropological research in everyday life. They studied composition at Musikhochschule Lübeck and at the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden. Their compositions unfold as situations, actions, and performance-installations engaging with ASMR, queer practice, human-animal relations, and cultural hacking. Works have been presented at Wien Modern, Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, Darmstadt International Summer Courses, and the London Contemporary Music Festival. They are a member of the Y-E-S collective.

Shifted is the alias of Alexander Menzinsky, a British electronic musician based in London. Working within industrial techno and experimental electronics, he releases on Avian — the label he co-runs with SHXCXCHCXSH and Ancient Methods — alongside other underground techno imprints. Albums including Appropriation of Remnants (2013) and Under a Single Banner (2014) document his approach to long-form, atmospheric techno that draws on both the physical demands of the club and a more contemplative compositional practice. He has performed internationally and is associated with the Avian collective's particular brand of underground industrial techno.

Ilpo Väisänen (born 1963) is a Finnish musician, one half of Pan Sonic alongside Mika Vainio. While Pan Sonic's stark electronic minimalism made them one of the most influential projects in industrial and experimental electronic music, Väisänen has also pursued a substantial solo practice under his own name. His solo work extends the Pan Sonic aesthetic into more organic and drone-oriented territory, incorporating acoustic instruments alongside electronics. He has collaborated widely in European experimental music and continues to release solo recordings and perform, maintaining the rigorous formal sensibility that characterised his work with Vainio.

Born in Winnipeg in 1976, this Canadian artist now based in Berlin creates electroacoustic compositions, performances, sculptures, and installations with focused listening and haptic gesture at their core. Using subtle manipulations of everyday materials, her work produces texturally nuanced sound that re-tunes the ear toward the barely audible. Since 2001 she has performed worldwide in collaboration with Oren Ambarchi, Toshimaru Nakamura, Annea Lockwood, and others, including a long-running duo with James Rushford as Ora Clementi. Her recordings have appeared on Black Truffle, Penultimate Press, and INA-GRM.

Junko is a Japanese vocalist and a longtime member of Hijokaidan, founded in 1978 by Jojo Hiroshige. The confrontational quality of Junko's vocal work radically expands interpretive possibilities for the audience, operating in a mode too improvisational to be punk, too chaotic to be free jazz, and yet too intimate to be dismissed as mere noise. Her practice represents a blend of anti-melodic and anti-symbolic engagement with the varied textures of the human voice taken to extreme limits.

Her contributions to Hijokaidan span decades of performances and recordings, and her work has been a defining element of the group's identity.

Panasonic was the original name used by Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen — the duo later known as Pan Sonic — until a legal dispute with the electronics company Panasonic forced a name change in 1996. Under the Panasonic name they released Vakio (1993) and Osasto (1994) on their own Sähkö Recordings label. The music — stark, minimal electronic pulses and bass frequencies applied with machine-like precision — was already fully formed in these early releases and established the aesthetic that would make Pan Sonic one of the most influential projects in European experimental electronic music.

Yohimbe is the solo noise and power electronics project of Laurie M. Peterson, established in 2007 in Raleigh, North Carolina, and based in Richmond, Virginia since 2014. Recordings draw on turntables, FM synthesizers, circuit-bent electronics, guitar, and vocals, layered into dense, abrasive textures.

Releases include Spill Kit, I Would Marry You, and the collaborative Black Box with Skin Graft, issued through the Cleveland label Evidence Tapes, alongside earlier work on the Hot Releases imprint.

Peterson's live performances as Yohimbe are known for their raw, demanding intensity, situating the project within the American DIY power electronics and harsh noise underground.

Anxxiety is an experimental noise and electronic project operating in industrial and power electronics territories. The project produces music of confrontational intensity, working with the abrasive sonic materials — distortion, feedback, extreme dynamics, and manipulated voice — that characterize the power electronics tradition originating with British artists in the early 1980s.

Operating within the international underground noise community, Anxxiety has released material through the channels of physical media — cassette tapes and limited editions — that typify the distribution networks of extreme electronic music.

Anri Sala (b. 1974, Tirana) is an Albanian artist working across film, video, sound installations and sculpture. His poetic, often melancholic pieces examine memory, architecture, time and the subtle interplay between image and sound within politically and historically charged contexts. Through sensitive treatment of perception and duration, his work continues to influence contemporary installation art. His major work Ravel Ravel Unravel (2013) explored synchronisation and interpretive freedom through simultaneous performances of Ravel's Piano Concerto. He represented France at the 2013 Venice Biennale.

Ella Jenkins (1924–2024) was an American musician and educator born in St. Louis, Missouri, widely regarded as the mother of American children's folk music. Her recordings for Folkways, beginning with Call-and-Response (1957), introduced generations of children to participatory singing, world music traditions, and cross-cultural exchange through simple rhythmic call-and-response patterns. She performed and recorded with Pete Seeger and was a fixture on WFMT radio in Chicago for decades. Her approach to music as a democratic and inclusive practice carried political resonance throughout the civil rights era and beyond.

Meredith Monk (b. 1942, Lima, Peru; raised in the United States) is a composer, vocalist, choreographer, and performance artist whose work has fundamentally reshaped the landscape of contemporary experimental music. Since the 1960s, she has developed a singular artistic language grounded in extended vocal techniques and deeply interdisciplinary practice, weaving together music, movement, theater, and film.

Her works often unfold as meditative spaces exploring memory, embodiment, and the vast expressive potential of the human voice beyond words.

:zoviet*france: is a British collective formed in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1980 whose experimental recordings and distinctive visual presentation placed them among the most singular entities in the post-industrial and dark ambient landscape. Working anonymously and collaboratively, they created music from field recordings, tribal percussion, drone, and processed sound, packaged in elaborate handmade covers that became objects of fascination. Their releases—including the cassette Garista (1980) and the album Mohnomishe (1983)—established an aesthetic of mysterious ambiguity that influenced generations of experimental and dark ambient artists, treating packaging as inseparable from the sound.

Born in Los Angeles in 1951, she studied at Bennington College and received her BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1972 under mentor John Baldessari. For nearly two decades she lived in Europe, first in Amsterdam then Berlin, before settling in New York. Loosely affiliated with the Pictures Generation, her installations, photography, and books explore notions of collecting, taste, and the meanings embedded in objects and their arrangement. She has described herself as a novelist who inadvertently became a visual artist, foregrounding the relationships between things rather than individual images or objects.

Born in Bremen in 1974, he studied electronic music at the Institute for Sonology at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague under Clarence Barlow, Joel Ryan, and Konrad Boehmer. Based in Berlin, he works with synthesizer and computer, often in long-running collaboration with Serge Baghdassarians across installation, sculpture, video, radio, and performance. In 2012 he and Baghdassarians received the Karl-Sczuka-Preis for the sound performance Bodybuilding. He is a member of The Pitch and the Splitter Orchester and has held residencies at the Cite des Arts in Paris and STEIM in Amsterdam.

Osaka-born electronic musician and illustrator. He has been making music since the early 1990s, working across noise, microsound, ambient, glitch, and abstract hip-hop. His international debut Upside Down appeared on Mille Plateaux in 1998, and subsequent releases came out on Raster-Noton, Skam, Wordsound, and Important Records. He operates under several aliases, most notably NHK and Koyxen. In 2006 he formed the duo NHK with Toshio Munehiro, and his collaborators include Merzbow, Asmus Tietchens, Rashad Becker, and Autechre's Sean Booth.

Composer and double bass player born in 1981 in Ludmannsdorf-Bilčovs, Austria, who studied double bass at the Conservatory of Vienna and computer music at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. He works across new music, electroacoustic composition, theatre, contemporary dance, and film, combining double bass with modular synthesizer and speakers. With Maja Osojnik he forms the electro-acoustic duo Rdeča Raketa, and is a member of the Low Frequency Orchestra alongside Angelica Castello, Thomas Grill, and Osojnik. His influences span musique concrète, hip-hop, techno, jazz, and early music, producing a practice centered on timbre, sampling, and the spatial movement of sound.

Russell Haswell is an artist, record producer, free improvisor, computer musician, noise aficionado and curator based in Glasgow. He graduated from Coventry School of Art in 1991 and has since performed in over 30 countries, presenting extensively at venues and festivals including the Prix Ars Electronica, Serpentine Pavilion, Barbican, Frieze Music, ICA, SONAR, ATONAL, the V-A-C Foundation in Russia, MOFO in Tasmania, the Office for Contemporary Art in Norway, ICC Tokyo and CCA in Japan.

His practice encompasses solo performance with computers and custom software, collaborative work with a wide range of musicians and artists, and highly ambitious large-scale audio installations.

Ursel Schlicht is a German pianist, composer, and musicologist specializing in jazz, improvisation, and the intersection of music and gender studies. She holds a doctorate in musicology from the University of Hamburg and has researched the working conditions of women jazz musicians including Marian McPartland and Geri Allen. Moving to New York in 1994, she worked in the city's free, experimental, and jazz scenes before returning to Germany, where she now teaches improvisation at the University of Kassel. Her SonicExchange project, which premiered at documenta13 in 2012, brought together 50 artists from nine countries and continues as a series exploring improvisation and cultural exchange.

Julius Eastman (1940–1990) was an American composer, vocalist, and pianist whose work combined minimalism with a direct, politically charged expression of Black and gay identity. His compositions — Evil Nigger, Gay Guerrilla, Crazy Nigger — are among the most powerfully titled and performed in American minimalism. He performed with the S.E.M. Ensemble and collaborated with Meredith Monk. He died in poverty and relative obscurity. Posthumous reconstruction of his work — much of it without surviving scores — has established him as one of the most important and undervalued American composers of the twentieth century.

Born in New York in 1954, he studied with Alvin Lucier at Wesleyan University and has worked alongside John Cage and David Tudor. He has been editor-in-chief of Leonardo Music Journal, visiting artistic director of STEIM in Amsterdam, and is a professor in the Department of Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His book Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking, first published in 2006 and expanded in subsequent editions, is a standard reference for DIY circuit practice and hardware hacking in experimental music.